Like Joseph Smith, Pearl Curran appears to have lacked the education necessary to produce such works. Individuals close to her were quick to point out that while she was an intelligent woman, she was clearly unacquainted with early English literature and "never had read anything archaic." This curious situation prompted one observer to note that "if Patience Worth be an invention, the inventor is a genius of no mean order."

While for many years Curran received communications from Worth through a ouija board, this was not her only method. Just as Joseph Smith eventually began to dictate revelations without the aid of a seer stone, so Curran began to dictate the words of Patience Worth without any physical object. Curran "simply saw the pictures and the words in her head and called them out, as coming from the hand of Patience Worth."

As with other such writers, Curran was not in a state of trance but was fully alter while dictating Worth's words. . . . She was known to have dictated nearly 6,000 words in a single sitting and was once timed at producing 110 words per minute. In contrast, when Curran composed her own writing, the process was slower, sometimes requiring most of an afternoon to write a single letter.

. . .

But beyond these general parallels to the experience of automatic writers, what is the evidence that Joseph Smith's translation is an example of this phenomenon? To begin with, the content of automatic writing is often similar to that of the Book of Mormon: Examples include multiple authorship, use of archaic language, accounts of bygone historical figures, accurate descriptions of times and places apparently unfamiliar to the writer, narratives with well-developed characters and plot, accounts of various ministries of Jesus Christ, poetics, occasionally impressive literary quality, doctrinal, theological, and cosmological discussions, and even discourses by deity.

More importantly, the manner in which Joseph produced the Book of Mormon, and apparently many revelations and other scriptures as well, bears strong resemblance to the process of automatic writing. For example, there is no indication that Smith used notes or outlines or conducted major reworkings of his materials prior to their initial publication. While such conditions are characteristic of a relatively simple translation task, they are also typical of automatic writing.