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I realize this is OK grammatically, and it even makes sense eventually, but what would you call this style/construction, and how could it be fixed to be more digestible? Is it a run-on sentence, or is it just poorly arranged?

It's to get kind of a little push maybe from being a long sedan with a front engine that makes me have to wait to get the car turned and pointed toward the apex and then roll into the power.

(From Car and Driver online, reporting on a test drive of a new model)

Brian Hitchcock
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    Ok grammatically? – WS2 Sep 30 '15 at 21:26
  • An example of circumlocution, perhaps? How about verbosity? How about just plain poor style? Don – rhetorician Sep 30 '15 at 21:52
  • It may be syntactically all right (especially if you add commas as in egrunin’s answer), but it makes about as much sense to me as “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”. How can getting a little push make someone be forced to wait to get their car turned around? And why is this same person apparently a long sedan with a front engine? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 30 '15 at 22:11
  • I'd call it simply discursive: a transcription of discourse (I expect you wouldn't have noticed how rambling it is if you'd heard it rather than read it; our ears are much more forgiving than our eyes). – Dan Bron Sep 30 '15 at 22:49
  • Could you put a link to the source? – michael_timofeev Sep 30 '15 at 23:58
  • @JanusBahsJacquet It's lacking the previous sentence. The it there is referential not a dummy subject (this sentence does not involve an extraposition). The it, as far as I can tell refers to some understeer which seems to have been deliberately engineered into the car. Best puncutation here would just be a hyphen between push and maybe – Araucaria - Him Oct 01 '15 at 14:53
  • @Araucaria I still don't understand what exactly it is that makes the writer have to wait to get the car “turned and pointed toward the apex and then roll into the power” (a phrase I don't really understand, either—but then I know bugger-all about cars, so that may just be me being mechanically challenged). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Oct 01 '15 at 18:17
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Yes, quite. If you see my deleted post below, you'll understand! – Araucaria - Him Oct 01 '15 at 20:15
  • Oops.. It's from Motor Trend, not Car & Driver. And that sentence apparently didn't make it into the final article (2015 Best Driver's Car)— I think I can guess why. – Brian Hitchcock Oct 02 '15 at 07:14

2 Answers2

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Commas might help...though I'm not sure I've understood the bizarre sentence, and thus may have misplaced them:

It's to get kind of a little push, maybe from being a long sedan with a front engine, that makes me have to wait to get the car turned and pointed toward the apex, and then roll into the power.

egrunin
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The phrasing sounds like stream of consciousness.

A literary style in which a character’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue.

Oxford Dictionaries Online

And @egrunin does a good job of making it more understandable with punctuation.

bib
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