Posted by:
diangelo
(
)
Date: September 28, 2016 08:15PM
A few years ago I went through a BoM and crossed out all of the words that didn't add to the book at all. A lot of "and it came to pass"es and little words like "did" and "even" and "exceedingly" that impede the flow of the book without adding any real content. I only did it in a paper copy of the BoM, with the first few chapters of First Nephi, but I ended up cutting about a third of the words within that section. (!) To me, this makes the BoM seem like someone had written it from whole cloth and padded it with superfluous words to make the book seem more impressive, since the Bible isn't like that. It reminds me of what I used to do in English class to meet a specified word count.
I don't know if anyone has made an Abridged Book of Mormon before. I might give it a go. Just for fun, I edited out almost all instances of the phrase "...it came to pass that..." from a txt file of the BoM, and it reduced the word count from 269551 to 262893. That's almost a 2.5% reduction!
You can see the "came-to-pass"-less version here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9aVNkzJTHafbW02YkVVMXNDam8/view
By the way, does anyone know what happened to the old New Order Mormon forum?