FAIR Topical Guide

Guide Home > Scripture and Influential Writings > Book of Mormon > Textual Issues > Wordprints

Additional Topics

The following are additional topic areas related to Wordprints. If there is a bracket number after the topic, that number indicates how many actual articles there are related to that subject. If the link for the topic is not live, it simply means the topic is a 'planned area' for future growth.

FAIR Resources

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"Book of Mormon wordprint studies," FAIR Wiki (City Unknown: FAIR) This FAIR Wiki article responds to the following question: What are wordprints? What do they have to do with the Book of Mormon?

Other Resources

The resources listed below are related items available on the Web that should be of interest. These links are to information not located on the FAIR Web site.

Philip A. Allred, "Alma's Use of State in the Book of Mormon: Evidence of Multiple Authorship," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies (Provo: FARMS, 1996), 140-146 All but two of the eleven writers who used state did so infrequently and sporadically. In contrast, the recorded writings of Alma, and in one case, Lehi, contain passages that display unusual concentrations of the word state. Allred looks at how this non-contextual word suggest multiple authorship for the Book of Mormon.

G. Bruce Schaalje, John L. Hilton and John B. Archer; "Comparative Power of Three Author-Attribution Techniques for Differentiating Authors," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies (Provo: FARMS, 1997), 47-63 Over the last twenty years, various objective author-attribution techniques have been applied to the English Book of Mormon in order to shed light on the question of multiple authorship of Book of Mormon texts. Two methods, one based on rates of use of noncontextual words and one based on word-pattern ratios, measure patterns consistent with multiple authorship in the Book of Mormon. Another method, based on vocabulary-richness measures, suggests that only one author is involved. These apparently contradictory results are reconciled by showing that for texts of known authorship, the method based on vocabulary-richness measures is not as powerful in discerning differences among authors as are the other methods, especially for works translated into English by a single translator.

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Last Updated August 30, 2009
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