Nephi makes an important statement. He gives his personal relationship to the text. He has written it himself, and he declares that it is a true record, according to his knowledge. This statement is a typical addition to an ancient document, and is called a colophon.
A colophon served to identify the important information about the author. It could be found at the end of documents, or, as in this case, at the beginning. In a world before publishing, a document might be hand-copied a number of times. The person whose hand wrote the copy would not necessarily be the person who composed the document. If the colophon was copied, then the reader was to understand that even the copies reflected the original writer rather than the copyist.
Hugh Nibley noted that a typical colophon would contain the writer’s name, the writer’s lineage, and sometimes an affirmation of the written text’s trustworthiness. These are the very things we see in Nephi’s colophon.
When Nephi tells us that he made the text with his own hand, we have a double meaning. We will learn in 1 Nephi 1:17 that Nephi also physically created the plates. It will be on the very plates that Nephi made that his brother, Jacob, will write his own addition to Nephite history.