Hugh Nibley identifies 30 rules for lucrative anti-Mormon book writing and expounds upon each rule, in the cited work, through examples found in various anti-Mormon books. The rules are reprinted here to aid in the identification and dissection of critical works.

RULE 1: Don't be modest! Your first concern should be to make it clear that You are the man for the job, that amidst a "mass of lies and contradictions" you are uniquely fitted to pass judgment.

RULE 2: A benign criticism of your predecessors will go far towards confirming your own preeminence in the field. Refer gently but firmly to the bias, prejudice, and inadequate research, however unconscious or understandable, of other books on the subject.

RULE 3: Curtsies and bouquets to everyone can be delivered in a profuse and unctuous appendix or introduction and go a long way toward establishing the image of the writer as a really good fellow who admires and respects everybody and is therefore the last man in the world to distort or exaggerate.

RULE 4: Proclaim the purity of your motives, especially your freedom from mercenary considerations.

RULE 5: Proclaim your love for the Mormon people.

RULE 6: Allow the Mormons a few normal human failings. That will make your story more plausible, establish you as a fair-minded and tolerant reporter, and so render your verdict all the more damning when you choose to lower the beam.

RULE 7: Furnish documents!

RULE 8: Avoid footnotes! This is not only the easiest but also the safest rule to follow.

RULE 9: Be lavish in your appendix! Pour it on! Name everybody and everything.

RULE 10: Be a name dropper! The average reviewer is the last person in the world to be seriously critical of sources (why should he seek for trouble?) and will be only too glad to go along with a writer who is good enough to include real names from time to time among the usual harvest of "it is said," "it was reported," "it was believed," etc.

RULE 11: Control your sources!

RULE 12: Wave your credentials! Remind the reader from time to time of your "years of intensive research." If you need high authorities you can always promote your helpers to meet the demand.

RULE 13: Establish immediate intellectual ascendancy by opening your book, as is the fashion, with a tremendous blast of meticulous erudition to intimidate the reader and discourage any smart-aleck questions.

RULE 14: Have something new to sell. Every anti-Mormon writer is selling what has already been sold again and again.

RULE 15: Get an inside track! Aside from your personal qualifications and zeal, you must enjoy the position of a privileged observer.

RULE 16: Don't answer questions! Remember the useful phrase "But as this comes from a Mormon source it must be discounted."

RULE 17: In place of evidence use Rhetoric! When one is making grave criminal charges, either directly or by broad implication as all anti-Mormon writers do, questions of evidence can be very bothersome unless one has the wisdom and foresight to avoid all such questions. Surprisingly enough, this can be done rather easily.

RULE 18: Use lack of evidence as evidence! No knack is more useful than that of turning one's lack of information into a definite asset in dealing with the Mormons.

RULE 19: Use the unfulfilled condition to make out a case against the Mormons where there is neither evidence nor absence of evidence, i.e., where nothing at all has happened.

RULE 20: Be generous with hints—they are very effective and you never have to prove anything.

RULE 21: Use quotation marks without sources—the most effective hinting device, and the most popular with anti-Mormon writers.

RULE 22: Discuss motives; read minds! This is a must in dealing with Mormon history. Here we have people claiming divine revelation and as a result doing all sorts of unusual things; since there is no such thing as divine revelation, how do we explain the unusual doings? Only by reading the minds of the actors.

RULE 23: Be cute!... Anti-Mormon humor is especially effective when it is the gentle irony of a man of the world.

RULE 24: Make atmosphere your objective. "Nowadays," writes Trevor-Roper, "to carry conviction, a historian must document, or appear to document, his formal narrative, but his background, his generalizations, allusions, comparisons remain happily free from this inconvenience.

RULE 25: Attack not the thing but the Image! For your readers Mormonism is what you say it is: it is to establish that thesis that you have been at such pains with your personal buildup. Once entrenched as an official guide, you can take your readers where you please; it is not the thing you are showing them from then on, but your interpretation of the thing. It has been the practice of religious polemic in every age to attack not what the opposition practice and preach but our impression of what they practice and preach.

RULE 26: Enjoy the prerogatives of "unequal scholarship," i.e., "the scrupulous straining at small historical gnats which diverts attention from the silent digestion of large and inconvenient camels....The nice thing about the principle of unequal scholarship is that it allows you, when you have no evidence for your main theme, to talk about something else for which you do have evidence. Such a dodge needs no apology, for as any writer knows, it takes very little skill to establish some sort of connection between any two subjects on earth.

RULE 27: Be literary! As a creative writer you should feel free to say whatever you please without having to answer to anybody. No one can call you to account for what is put down as pure fiction...It is your prerogative as a creative writer to claim your poetic license. Literature should be superior to the mean quibbling and meticulous hairsplitting of philology or history—does a great painting have to have the accuracy of a photograph? Anti-Mormon literature is the creation of a society of scalds who share a common material and a common goal, who freely borrow from each other and freely refashion what they borrow. The facts of the Mormon story are as well known to these bards as the corpus of classic mythology once was to the poets—since the main tales and images are never in doubt, the individual artist is free to do with any one of them pretty much what he will.

RULE 28: Develop a special vocabulary of loaded and emotive words. As a literary artist, you have this prerogative.

RULE 29: Study the techniques of gossip.

RULE 30: Preserve a gap between your readers and the Mormons. At a passage where even the most obtuse reader might boggle at the sheer excess and enormity of your tale, do not hesitate to remind him that he is in no position to know about things happening in the far away Tibet of the Rockies.

(Source: Hugh Nibley, Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass: The Art of Telling Tales About Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, edited by David Whittaker [Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book Co., Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1991], 474-528.)