10. Emma Smith claimed that Joseph Smith never needed
to be prompted on where to resume dictation. The evidence in the original
manuscript for this is indirect. If Joseph needed to be prompted and he was otherwise
winging it, so to speak, he could well have repeated text that he had already
dictated at the end of the previous session. But there is absolutely no
evidence for this kind of dittography in the original manuscript. Although
there is evidence for 14 dittographies in the earliest extant script. Although there
is evidence for 14 dittographies in the earliest extant text, each of these
occurs in the middle of a sentence and is quite short, usually one to three
words, as in this example from Chrisitan Whitmer in 1 Nephi 12:1: “and I looked
and I beheld the land the land of promise”. Here the first instance of the
land ends a line and the repeated instance begins the next line, a common
place where dittographies occur in textual transmission. (Royal Skousen, "On
the Importance of the Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon," in
Steadfast in Defense of Faith: Essays in Honor of Daniel C. Peterson, ed.
Shirley S. Ricks, Stephen D. Ricks, and Louis C. Midgley [Provo, UT:
Interpreter Foundation; Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2023], 165, emphasis in
original)
