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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)

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    Ok grammatically?
    – WS2
    Sep 30, 2015 at 21:26
  • An example of circumlocution, perhaps? How about verbosity? How about just plain poor style? Don
    – rhetorician
    Sep 30, 2015 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, 2015 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, 2015 at 22:49
  • Could you put a link to the source?
    – michael_timofeev
    Sep 30, 2015 at 23:58

2 Answers 2

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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.

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  • +1 Good job on turning stream of consciousness into humanspeak.
    – bib
    Sep 30, 2015 at 21:25
  • @bib stream of consciousness: you nailed it. Post that as an answer and you're guaranteed this man's vote.
    – Dan Bron
    Sep 30, 2015 at 23:01
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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.

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  • As promised. If I had a checkmark, I'd award that, too :)
    – Dan Bron
    Oct 1, 2015 at 0:10

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