Literature: These verses form a literary set, with each verse consisting of a pair of concepts: The people think about what they have heard, then react to it. This pair is then set into a series of paired contrasts: one positive and one sorrowful. Verse 7 sets up the verses with the “wonder and amazement.” The rest of the verses define the nature of that “wonder and amazement.”
Verses 8 and 9 create a contrast, as the people contemplate the news, then exhibit opposite reactions (joyful and sorrowful). Verses 10 and 11 form a similar unit: joyful thanks to Yahweh contrasted with pain for those not in Yahweh’s favor. These two sets are also in parallel to each other.
Redaction: This passage is obviously a carefully constructed parallelism. Because it is unusually literary for Mormon’s style, it is possible that he is replicating a form that appears in the underlying source, rather than creating it himself.