Rey L. Pratt · 1927 April General Conference · 1927-04-06
Transcribed from the OCR of the official printed Conference Report published by the Deseret News and hosted at the Internet Archive (conferencereport1927a, underlying file conferencereport981chur_djvu.txt). Running heads, page numbers, and line-break hyphenation removed.
No witness list recorded beyond the primary source.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the OCR/scan witness (Internet Archive conferencereport1927a); reclassified from the garbled placeholder speaker 'Of The Mexican Mission' to the actual speaker, Rey L. Pratt, identified from the printed running head 'ELDER REY L. PRATT' and the sub-header 'President of the Mexican Mission' immediately preceding the body text. Fixed OCR errors ('Job s' for Job's, 'nothing- else' for 'nothing else', a stray period in 'the.', 'seem.,' for 'seem,', 'mony' hyphenation artifact, 'reGENERAL CONFERENCE view' running-head bleed mid-word for 'review', 'manufacured' for 'manufactured', 'oppdsite'-type doubled/garbled letters elsewhere in this conference are absent here but similar patterns were checked, and similar), removed running heads and page numbers, and reflowed paragraphs. Supplied a title drawn from the Job quotation that opens the talk. Corrected speaker, speaker_id, calling_at_time, date, and session.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: page-by-page collation against the conferencereport1927a djvu OCR (conferencereport981chur_djvu.txt). The talk had been filed under a garbled placeholder speaker, 'Of The Mexican Mission' (evidently an OCR/ingest artifact that captured only the calling sub-header and dropped the actual name above it). The OCR shows the sub-header immediately above the body reads 'ELDER REY L. PRATT / President of the Mexican Mission', and the printed index confirms 'Pratt, Elder Rey L ... 169'. Reclassified speaker to Rey L. Pratt and speaker_id to rey-l-pratt (matching the existing convention used for his other talks in this vault, e.g. 1927-10-15-rey-l-pratt-remarks-15.md) and set calling_at_time to 'Of the First Council of Seventy; President of the Mexican Mission' (matching the calling label used for Pratt's October 1927 talk). Confirmed this talk falls inside the Concluding Meeting (Fourth Day Afternoon Meeting, Wednesday, April 6, 1927), immediately following Elder John Wells's address (1927-04-54) and immediately preceding President Heber J. Grant's sustaining of the General Authorities (1927-04-56), with no adjacent session material intervening. Corrected date from 1927-04-01/approximate to 1927-04-06/exact and session from 'Second Day Morning Session' to 'Fourth Day Afternoon Meeting (Concluding Meeting)', consistent with 1927-04-50 through 1927-04-54. Corrected source_url page anchor from a proportional estimate (n170) to the exact leaf n171 using the item's page_numbers.json leaf map (printed page 169 = leaf 171, leaf = printed page + 2, matching the pattern confirmed across this conference's Fourth Day talks). Body text collated word-for-word against the OCR paragraph by paragraph, including the opening quotation from Job. Supplied a title from the talk's opening quotation (Job 19:23-27, 'Oh that my words were now written'), which the talk itself uses to frame its subject, the nature and power of personal testimony.
This is a living critical edition. If you find a transcription, metadata, or sourcing error in this talk, report it to the editors →Reports are collated against the page scan and land as corrections in the vault.