when the author has such downright awkward, disjointed and mashed-together style

Some of that may be the fault of my excerpting/editing. There were so many short paragraphs I felt I had to combine a bunch for HTML presentation (little paragraphs may work well in a double-column narrow magazine layout, but in a single column wide layout? not so much), and I tried to cut as much material as possible (otherwise there's no point in excerpting and I should've just left it as a pointer to the PDF).