Unintentional humour in textbooks

I'm nearing the end of my Training and Development course; my final exam is tomorrow night. The textbook is entitled, not surprisingly, Employee Training & Development. I dislike this book because it was written for length and not for clarity. The ideas are there, but the language is so verbose that it becomes a chore to wade through. Well, maybe not, if you enjoy deciphering sentences like:

"The information technology department needs to be involved in the design of any web-based program to ensure that the technological capabilities of the company network are understood and to guarantee that trainees can get access to the browsers and connections they need to participate in e-learning and utilize all of the tools (e.g. e-mail, chatrooms, hyperlinks) that may accompany it."

I have not altered this sentence in any way, though you may suspect that I removed the four or five needed commas. Sixty words--no commas, semi-colons, or any place to take a breath. Not only that, but it has parentheses! More stuff to keep track of. Seriously, if you're reading a sentence aloud and you have to take more than four breaths, or you forget what the first part of the sentence was about, then maybe it should be broken up.

So yeah, this textbook is loaded with these gems; it's very dry and it sucks out what little life there is in a subject. But once in a while the authors try to liven things up, and they fail miserably. Here is my favourite passage in the book; it's a description of how the transfer of training can have negative effects:

"Care must be taken in thinking through how the learned capabilities will transfer to work tasks in the real world. For example, in police officer training, new hires (cadets) practise shooting targets. During practice sessions at one police academy, cadets fired a round of shells, emptied the cartridges into their hands, and disposed of the empty cartridges into the nearest garbage can. This process was repeated several times. After graduation from the police academy, one new officer was involved in a shooting. He fired his gun, emptied the cartridges into his hand, and proceeded to look for a garbage can for the empty cartridges. As a result, he was seen by the gunman, shot, and killed!"

What makes this passage so great is its use of the exclamation point. Without it, the passage reads like a plainly written, vivid anecdote. Having it in there makes it seem like an inappropriate joke. Imagine telling this story at a wedding, half drunk, to distant relatives that you've just met. Now, imagine telling it in an upbeat tone, with your voice cracking just slightly at the end. This is what the exclamation point conveys. It's an author's attempt to add emphasis to a story that doesn't need emphasis. A cop did something stupid and got his face blown off--the story tells itself.