Book of Mormom Evidences- Word Printing

Word printing analysis of the Book of Mormon is evidence that the Book of Mormon is a work of multiple authorship, meaning it was written by many authors, not just Joseph Smith or one of his contemporaries.

Wordprinting, or "stylometry" as it is more commonly known, is the science of measuring literary style. The main assumption underlying stylometry is that an author has aspects of literary style that may be unconsciously used, and can be used to identify their work. Stylometrists analyze literature using statistics, math formulas and artificial intelligence to determine the "style" of an author's writing.

Researchers often attempt to use "non-contextual words" (e.g. such as: and, if, the, etc.) A more sophisticated approach was taken by John Hilton and non-LDS colleagues at Berkeley.] The "Berkeley Group's" method relied on non-contextual word patterns, rather than just individual words. This more conservative method was designed from the ground up, and required works of at least 5,000 words.

The Berkeley Group compared Book of Mormon texts written by Nephi and Alma with themselves, with each other, and with writings by Joseph Smith, his scribe Oliver Cowdery and Solomon Spaulding who early critics thought Joseph Smith copied the idea of the Book of Mormon from. Their findings are below;

Authors and their Cumulative chance of being the same author

Nephi and Alma = 1.5 x 10 to the 14th = 0.000000000000015 chance

(This is roughly a 1 in 15 trillion chance that the books of Nephi and Alma were written by the same author. Hilton rightly terms this "statistical overkill")

Joseph Smith and Alma = 2.5 x 10 to the 15th chance
Joseph Smith and Nephi = less than 2.7 x 10 to the 20th chance
Oliver Cowdery and Alma = 6.25 x 10 to the 17th chance
Oliver Cowdery and Nephi = less than 8.1 x 10 to the 19th chance
Spaulding and Alma = less than 3 x 10 to the 11th chance
Spaulding and Nephi = less than 7.29 x 10 to the 28th chance

Conclusion: As John Hilton put the matter, if wordprinting is a valid technique, then this analysis suggests that it is "statistically indefensible" to claim that Joseph, Oliver, or Solomon Spaulding wrote the 30,000 words in the Book of Mormon attributed to Nephi and Alma. The Book of Mormon also contains work written by more than one author. Critics who wish to reject Joseph's account of the Book of Mormon's production must therefore identify multiple authors for the text, and then explain how Joseph acquired it and managed to pass it off as his own.

Read the complete article here: http://fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon/Wordprint_studies