Editing Book of Mormon (section)

===Presentation===
The style of the Book of Mormon's English text resembles that of the King James Version of the Bible.{{Sfn|Shalev|2014|p=104}} [[Novelist]] Jane Barnes considered the book "difficult to read",{{Sfn|Barnes|2012|p=500}} and according to religious studies scholar Grant Hardy, the language is an "awkward, repetitious form of English" with a "nonmainstream literary aesthetic".{{Sfn|Hardy|2010|p=5}} Narratively and structurally, the book is complex, with multiple arcs that diverge and converge in the story while contributing to the book's overarching plot and themes.{{Sfn|Givens|2009|p=61}} Historian [[Daniel Walker Howe]] concluded in his own appraisal that the Book of Mormon "is a powerful epic written on a grand scale" and "should rank among the great achievements of American literature".{{Sfn|Howe|2007|p=314}}

The Book of Mormon presents its text through multiple narrators explicitly identified as figures within the book's own narrative. Narrators describe reading, redacting, writing, and exchanging records.{{Sfn|Maffly-Kipp|2008|pp=ix–x}} The book also embeds sermons, given by figures from the narrative, throughout the text, and these internal orations make up just over 40 percent of the Book of Mormon.{{sfn|Davis|2020|p=89}} Periodically, the book's primary narrators reflexively describe themselves creating the book in a move that is "almost postmodern" in its self-consciousness.{{Sfn|Bushman|2005|p=87|ps=: "the book seems almost postmodern in its self-conscious attention to the production of the text."}} Historian Laurie Maffly-Kipp explains that "the mechanics of editing and transmitting thereby become an important feature of the text".{{Sfn|Maffly-Kipp|2008|p=x}} Barnes calls the Book of Mormon a "scripture about writing and its influence in a post-modern world of texts" and "a statement about different voices, and possibly the problem of voice, in sacred literature".{{Sfn|Barnes|2012|p=501}}