Redaction: Mormon was moving toward the climax of his story—Korihor’s ignominious death—but interrupted it to confirm that Korihor’s listeners repented and returned to faithfulness. For continuity it is important to know that Korihor is traveling and begging so that we may understand why he goes among the Zoramites. Thus, Mormon repeats twice (vv. 56, 58) that Korihor was a traveling beggar. The repetition provides the transition to his on-going narrative. I see in this passage confirmation of Mormon’s methods in creating his final text. Mormon is following a script or outline, created before he began engraving his text on the metal plates. That outline was not, however, so rigid that he could not insert other information that became relevant during the inscribing process. The plate text is the end result of a multi-stage process.
As I understand that process, Mormon’s first step would have been to read the sources available to him, making notes as he went, not only so that he could refer to them in the next stage but so he could easily return to the original source for a specific passage (such as the various sermons) that he wanted to quote. The next step would be to conceive his narrative structure, selecting the stories he would tell and the order in which they would appear. There would have been no need to copy the speeches he planned to quote. In fact, copying them once to paper, then again to the plates, would have increased the possibility of transcription errors. The originals were at hand, and I assume that he simply copied these sermons directly from his source to the plates.
The tight structural transitions, such as the repetition of Korihor’s begging, suggests that Mormon wrote a fairly detailed draft which guided his final redaction. The final step came in writing on the plates themselves. During that stage, Mormon inserted information that did not appear on his draft. This process is clearly apparent when, as in Korihor’s begging, he returns quickly to his narrative after an editorial explanation.