The style guide

Rule 01

The voice: plain narration, formal heaven

The narration is a person telling you the story: everyday words, natural contractions, no jargon. Divine speech stays dignified and never contracts — but its dignity comes from bearing and cadence, not from archaic vocabulary. Heaven still sounds different from the narrator; the difference is measured versus conversational, not old versus new.

Rule 02

Register follows the situation, not the speaker

The same speaker moves up and down the ladder with the kind of speech act. Christ preaching a sermon is elevated and uncontracted; Christ asking his disciples a question across a table is a person talking to people. Mormon narrating events is plain; Mormon turning to address the reader directly is preaching. The trigger is a genuine two-way exchange — a rhetorical question inside an oracle is still an oracle.

Rule 03

The elevated register has a floor

Individually reasonable rulings each nudge divine speech a little plainer, and nothing used to say what must survive the drift. Now something does. In every elevated span, in every book: no contractions, ever; no casual idiom; deliberate repetition stands; vocatives and measured cadence are licensed; and the traditional prophetic vocabulary — woe, remnant, stiff-necked — keeps its form. Any future ruling that lowers one of these must say so out loud and be ratified on that basis.

Rule 04

The causality voice

"And it came to pass" is not filler — it is the book's machinery for moving time and cause. So it is translated, not deleted: it becomes so, then, when, because, that's why, or it folds into the sentence that follows. Empty throat-clearing goes; logic stays. Chapters always open fresh, so each one can be read on its own.

Rule 05

What the original restates, modern English carries forward

The 1830 text names a thing again where a modern sentence would point back at it. So the restatement becomes a pronoun, a demonstrative, or an adverb: "when my father had heard these words" is "when my father heard this," and a place named a verse ago is simply "there." The narrator's "I, Nephi" is a book- and section-opening formula, not a tic — it is kept where the record opens and dropped to plain "I" in running narration. There is deliberately no numeric length target: the rules produce whatever length they produce, and this one never reaches divine speech, where repetition is structure.

Rule 06

The divine is never flattened

Where God acts, the text says so. "The Lord commanded" is never softened to wanted or asked; divine deliverance stays deliverance; and the "must" of prophecy and moral obligation keeps its force instead of relaxing into might. Modernizing the language must never quietly demote providence to coincidence.

Rule 07

Famous verses keep their music

Some lines are memorized, quoted, cross-referenced, and loved. Those keep their cadence even in plain prose. They are not protected by feel: they are listed, one by one, in the Protected Phrase Registry — currently 32 entries, each added only when Dan decides to, each enforced by the QA linter on every regeneration.

Browse the preserved phrases →

Rule 08

Plain, concrete words

Everyday English first: got, said, ran, stick. But precision beats plainness whenever a modern swap would bend the meaning — engraved stays engraved, tender mercies stay tender mercies, and the iron rod keeps its rod. The test is always whether the sentence still means what it meant.

Rule 09

Modern word order

The original's "[thing] of [material]" becomes the compound a person would actually say. Front it when "of Y" tells you what a thing is made of or like. Keep the "of" when it marks a sacred title or a fixed name — it stays the word of the Lord and the Spirit of the Lord, never "the Lord's word."

Rule 10

The archaism policy

Thee, thou, ye, hath, doth and unto are gone from the edition — with two deliberate exceptions on a three-tier ladder. Fixed liturgy (the sacrament prayers, the Lord's Prayer, the baptismal formula) is kept word for word, archaic pronouns and all. Famous fixed quotations keep "shall" and their traditional word order but modernize every dead function word. Everything else modernizes in full.

Rule 11

Woe, oaths, and epithets

The prophetic voice keeps its edge. "Woe to you" stays woe — an earlier draft paraphrased it and the paraphrase was retired, because six words were doing the work of one. Oath formulas keep their shape, and fixed epithets like the great and abominable church are treated as near-proper-nouns: they are names, not descriptions to be reworded.

Rule 12

Dialogue and paragraphs

A change of speaker is a paragraph break, attribution stays simple and out of the way, and quotations use modern quotation marks. Paragraphs follow the drama rather than the verse numbers — verse numbers only date to 1879 — so they appear as small superscripts inside flowing prose while the underlying text stays verse-aligned with the original.

Rule 13

Poetry is set as poetry

The Isaiah and Malachi quotations, Nephi's psalm in 2 Nephi 4, and Zenos's prayer are Hebrew verse, and Hebrew verse works by parallel lines. Those passages are set as lines rather than paragraphs, with hanging indents, so the couplets are visible instead of merely audible.

Rule 14

Punctuation and the em-dash budget

Long Hebrew periods become English sentences: semicolon chains are broken up, commas follow introductory phrases, and exclamation points are spent only where the feeling is real. The em-dash budget is strict — both because overuse is a style flaw, and because a machine left unsupervised will happily spend them all in one verse.