Tuesday, July 1, 2014

No Punctuation in Book of Mormon

So, I learned recently that the manuscript for the Book of Mormon was, essentially, one long run-on sentence. John Gilbert, who was E.B. Grandin's assistant, put in the punctuation. I'm glad he did, because it would have been a confused mess otherwise. However, the punctuation may not be what God had in mind or what Joseph understood. For example, Nephi quotes his father, then says, "These are the words of my father." The verses and punctuation are such that the sentence goes into a different verse than what the father said and there is a colon, as if the words that follow are "the words of my father," when they clearly are not.

So, I looked on my computer and found an 1830 Book of Mormon as a Word document. It doesn't quite match my hardcopy of the book because it has many paragraphs that are smaller, but it also has some huge paragraphs.

In any case, I took out the page numbers that interrupted the text at regular intervals (along with the name of the book, such as Nephi or Alma), and I took out the punctuation. I thought it would be fun for people to print it out and read it without the distraction of punctuation. You can print it out and fill in your own punctuation.

One was uploaded as a Word file.

The other was uploaded as a PDF.

Enjoy!

3 comments:

  1. This is awesome! Thank you!!

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  2. I was going through my copy of the book, and noticed that a phrase was missing. I don't know where the online copy I got originated from - probably a scan. In any case, as you go through this book be aware that scans don't always pick up things properly. It would be good to have a hard copy replica of the 1830 edition to double-check with as you go along.

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