LDS critics often claim that Joseph Smith’s First Vision accounts are contradictory, but this charge depends on selectively reading the sources rather than evaluating them as a whole. Joseph left 4 accounts over time, each produced for different audiences and purposes, and it is entirely expected that they emphasize different details—without negating one another. When examined together, the core elements remain consistent: Joseph prayed in response to religious confusion, experienced a divine manifestation, and was told that existing churches lacked divine authority. Variations in emphasis, vocabulary, and level of detail reflect normal human recollection and narrative context, not fabrication, and closely parallel the way legitimate historical events are recorded in multiple sources. 

"Critics of Mormonism have delighted in the discrepancies between the canonical account and earlier renditions, ...Such complaints, however, are much ado about relatively nothing.  Any good lawyer (or historian) would expect to find contradictions or competing narratives written down years apart and decades after the even.  And despite the contractictions, key elements abide."

Non-LDS Author Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, p. 171