In May 1845, Latter-day Saint attended the trial of the men accused of murdering JS. Watt had learned the phonetic shorthand developed by Sir Isaac Pitman in 1837, and during the 1845 trial in , Illinois, he took detailed notes of the trial testimony and proceedings. Pitman shorthand is a system of compressed writing where consonants and sometimes whole words are represented by straight or curved lines with diacritics and other small adjustments such as hooks or loops modifying the sounds or syllables. The simplified and abbreviated writing form complicates transcription of the shorthand into longhand. The same group of symbols can potentially be transcribed as a number of different words depending on context or vowel placement. Although shorthand allowed a trained reporter like Watt to record spoken words considerably faster than in longhand, the resulting shorthand manuscript was often incomplete. Reporters captured phrases and fragmentary sentences that often lacked formatting such as punctuation or capitalization, with the intent that when they transcribed their report into longhand, incomplete phrases could be expanded, connected, and formatted.

In the case of ’s account of the May 1845 trials, there are several incongruities between his shorthand and the surviving longhand account, which Watt and Daniel Mackintosh created thirteen years later. Notably, Watt’s shorthand contains considerably more material regarding the early stages of the trial. The attorneys’ arguments over appointing are much more detailed in the shorthand notes. The process of jury selection takes up over 20 manuscript pages in Watt’s shorthand notebooks and consists of over 6,000 words when transcribed, but it is entirely absent from the longhand account. The longhand account of witness testimony tracks very closely with Watt’s shorthand notes, although the longhand omits the brief testimony of John D. Mellen, who stated he was in at the time of the murders. Both Watt’s shorthand notes and the longhand account of the trial cut off following the witness testimony. Although Watt was in for the two days of closing arguments from the attorneys, no shorthand notes of those speeches survive.

To aid further research, Joseph Smith Papers staff members have prepared a line-by-line comparison of the two accounts. For more information on the case, see Introduction to State of Illinois v. Williams et al. and State of Illinois v. Elliott–C.