Is there a way to take the data in a some of the fields from a particular record and put it into series of text fields with a coherent formatting (that can be accessed within that email script) so as to avoid sending the record as an attachment?

You can create a form response with specific fields entered by creating a calculation in SendMail.

For example,

"Dear " & Contact::FirstName

In this example Contact is the name of a layout and FirstName is the name of a field.