Is there a name for this kind of sentence?

A colleague who teaches journalism writes to say that she’s seeing too many sentences like this:

• What I take from this interaction is that it’s important to be empathetic...
• What strikes me most about the reporting team’s process is...

“I'm having trouble explaining succinctly why this is bad writing,” she adds. “It's clearly unnecessary verbiage, but is there a name for this kind of sentence?"

These examples are variations on what I call "false starts." When you begin with "It is" or "I think," you launch with an icky subject and bury the meat of the sentence in a "that" phrase. In this case, the writer is also inserting herself into the situation unnecessarily. And there’s an additional problem: such a sentence engages in the kind of rhetorical hedging William Zinsser (in On Writing Well ) once deplored—without even using the usual "it seems."

As for the grammatical explanation (which to me is less important than the stylistic ones above), the writer is starting with a relative clause and then having to use another relative clause instead of a nice clean, subject + verb clause. It's easy to fix if you understand syntax:

"What I take from this interaction is that it’s important to be empathetic" becomes:

And "What strikes me most about the reporting team’s process" becomes:

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