When writing though, that is far less the case. The ‘immediacy’ fails. It would be like trying to make a vase out of clay on a wheel by writing a bunch of locations for fingers. It is amazingly harder. When writing, that ‘time gap’ entails that the normative meaning of the words and the interpretive process becomes far more important.

In the case of the Book of Mormon we have authors (Nephi, Jacob, and Mormon) who are primarily writing for a totally absent audience of unknown culture. That can’t help but be difficult.

Of course beyond all that there is probably the more practical and straight forward issue that writing is hard. Often harder than speaking. And that’s for us today in a culture that tends to use writing far, far more than oration now. In the ancient world when paper was so precious and there were no computers with backspaces writing was rarer and more difficult. Add in that we have the unknown nature of ‘reformed egyptian’ which almost certainly was harder than even ancient Hebrew (which had its own share of problems) and writing is probably very difficult.

The closest analogy is probably those folks who wrote in a kind of shorthand in a cipher. (That didn’t used to be that uncommon, and there are even examples in the early Church of folks writing in Masonic ciphers) That takes time and if one isn’t terribly good at it, probably is frustrating. The fact that you have to plan and think through things so much may also make it harder to catch the spirit of things that one could do when simply speaking by the spirit.

The writings of Nephi, for example exhibit features of oral ‘texts’: event-dominated rather than object-dominated, situated rather than abstract, additive, close to the life-world, etc.

Nephi clearly admired Isaiah’s style, and perhaps was not able to reproduce it. He wrote as he spoke, or as he was commanded to write, much of which was about what he saw: ‘Look!’ His ‘plainness’ in writing appears to be an attempt to accommodate the plainness of his people’s understanding. Yet, his reference to his people casting ‘things away which are written and esteem them as things of naught’ reflects what is noted elsewhere in the world (amongst Oral cultures), a suspicion with regard to the ‘truth’ of writing. So perhaps you are on to something here, that the BoM was prepared for the literate mind.

“What is ironic, though, is that by today’s standards of writing where clarity and simplicity are highly valued, Nephi’s writing would probably be judged as much better than Isaiah’s more abstruse writing style.” Well said (and I wish I had put it that way in Part 3, point #2).

These are all very difficult questions to me, so I’d really appreciate comments by others.

I will add that the more I think about these issues, the more I think “plainness” and “mighty in writing” are concepts that are very different than the way we are typically inclined to think about them. That is, I think we have to break ourselves out of our own modern, cultural inclinations and presuppositions to understand what’s going on. That is, I think “mighty in writing” and “plainness” may both have reference to the kind of symbolic script(ure)s that are enacted in the temple—not very familiar or easy to our way of thinking and understanding, but perhaps “plain” in the sense of giving us a very clear vision of how the purpose and trajectory of this life should be understood….

Probably what they needed was the technology to publish the transcripts of their sermons.