Sentence Nightmares

Today I came across a real monstrosity of a sentence:
"Given all that Americans read and hear today about the "increasingly serious" problem of family violence in newspapers and on television news broadcasts and newsmagazines, along with the frightening statistics publicized by some organizations devoted to addressing family violence, it is tempting to assume that the prevalence of family violence has reached an all-time high and is getting worse." (Family violence across the lifespan: An introduction, 2nd edition. 2005, O. Barnett, C.L. Miller-Perrin, & R.D. Perrin, p. 24).
Technically, this sentence has a lot of correct things about it. But it's just such a multi-jointed mouthful, jammed with information, that I had to read it several times.
Now I love a good run-on sentence as well as anyone, but this was such an awful sentence to find in a textbook of higher education that it deserves comment. (Sadly, there are numerous such word conglomerations in this text!)

My students have a difficult time writing sentences properly, often resorting to catch-all sentences of shocking proportions. Here is a sentence written in a theoretical analysis of the movie, Tortilla Soup:

"The death of Gomez at the end of the video contributes to the transformation of Martin’s context represented by his openness and acceptance of his daughter's choices to move out of the family house symbolized by offering the house for sale, and the regain of his taste and smell that explains the alternative context he developed that helped him resolve his complexity also symbolized by him proposing to Yolanda after choosing to remain single for long time after his ex-wife passed away."
That string of gobbledygook takes my breath away.

Here's another beauty:
"Her grandfather was a victim of financial abuse and with family members not being close to him and still in relatively good health when he died no one was aware that his savings had been cleared out and his home and land was signed over to a neighbor who he had also written checks that were supposedly gifts."
Phew!

My private fantasy about people who write these sentences is that they are excited writers who are frantically putting down facts without regard to structure. They are caught up in the moment and just don't want to leave out anything so everything gets said willy-nilly. I believe that these people are not boring, but rather, they are quite interesting people. They have so much content that it fairly bulges out of their sentences.
These are not the individuals who write uninspiring narratives such as, "That dog laying by the cat was lame. I don't know why. He couldn't walk away from the barn. The cat didn't seem to like him, either."

No. The "loaded bullet," full-of-facts writer enthuses, "There was this dog near a cat and the dog just couldn't move away from the cat even though the cat scratched him and the dog rolled off to one side to try to get away from him while he pushed with his feet against the wall where the horse harnesses were hanging by the haymow. The dog never did walk away, even though the cat hissed, scratched, and yowled at him, as he laid in a ball on the old blanket in the entryway of the barn that my grandfather built before the Spanish-American War. A person can't see any nails in the beams of that barn because it was made with pegs and grooves like all the old buildings were made back in the days when Teddy Roosevelt and his "rough riders" were in the news because of the men he surrounded himself with, but also because he had to be a rough rider to travel through all the national parks that he set up in those years. Anyway, the dog is probably lame because he couldn't get away from that cantankerous cat--the one who has a blue eye and a green eye, and who has seven toes on all four feet, so he can really scratch his enemies if he gets mad enough, and he scratched the dog who didn't move. So yeah, the dog is probably lame, poor thing that had to be put out in the old drafty barn with that idiot, hyperthyroid fleabag who is half-crazed with cat hallucinations and delusions of grandeur most of the time, even though he's as ugly as a dung heap."

Well, dog my cats! I'll take the run-on sentence writer's stories any day if they're this interesting and full of amazing facts.

Perhaps those textbook authors are smarter than I originally gave them credit for...