How to Use discursive in a Sentence

discursive

adjective

• There’s no doubt about the fact that the state has less control of the discursive realm.
  — Washington Post, 10 May 2017
• Pelosi’s discursive style of speaking does not lend itself to sound bites.
  — Matthew Yglesias, Vox, 20 Nov. 2018
• The book has a discursive quality and seems bloated, in need of a tighter edit.
  — Julia M. Klein, chicagotribune.com, 6 Sep. 2017
• But by the boulder the real action was social and discursive.
  — Anna Wiener, New Yorker, 4 May 2026
• The emails come to seem less like chapters in a novel than like installments of a discursive essay.
  — Caleb Crain, The Atlantic, 10 Aug. 2021
• News reports and quiet discussions on the subject waft through the movie like so much discursive haze.
  — K. Austin Collins, Rolling Stone, 28 Oct. 2022
• Trump’s response is so discursive that the Journal attempts to change the subject.
  — Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, 12 Jan. 2018
• That said, Ai’s film becomes more digressive than discursive.
  — Irene Hsu, New Republic, 31 Oct. 2017
• His palette is light, smudgy guitar textures and warm synths; his message, more gestural than discursive, is love and lust.
  — Pitchfork, 4 Dec. 2025
• Her approach is discursive, yet precise — Proust kneeling bedside on the carpet of a dorm.
  — New York Times, 12 Oct. 2021
• There’s a discursive ramble about ordering Chinese food that takes on a strange power.
  — Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire, 27 Jan. 2025
• Knowledge itself can be both logical and discursive.
  — Bruce Schneier, IEEE Spectrum, 21 Jan. 2026
• One teacher might follow a specific text more or less strictly, another might take a more discursive approach.
  — Philip Martin, Arkansas Online, 28 Sep. 2021
• The first chapter is a postnatal depression questionnaire filled out with discursive irony.
  — Hillary Kelly, Los Angeles Times, 30 Sep. 2021
• An entertaining and discursive journey into Dante’s life and work.
  — Washington Post, 5 Nov. 2021
• There’s something discursive about the way the music and narrative and gestures of the performers only combine in your head.
  — Juan A. Ramírez, Vulture, 24 Apr. 2024
• Its zigs and zags, its discursive ramblings and its journeys away from the character who ought to hold our attention had the jaggedness of human thought.
  — Daniel D'addario, Variety, 7 Nov. 2022
• Eventually, Gregory would return to the stage in a more discursive sort of act, in which the jokes were worked into the lecture.
  — Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times, 2 July 2021
• We should still be braced for a more discursive bot model to return—less of a sultry homewrecker and more of a sober therapist, perhaps, but return all the same.
  — Katherine Cross, WIRED, 17 Mar. 2023
• For Macron, who appears to be wheeling right ahead of presidential elections next year, the challenge is broader and discursive.
  — Washington Post, 22 Feb. 2021
• Ultimately, his discursive comments on vampires and werewolves may have actually been more helpful than not—and that says a whole lot about this race’s tone.
  — Philip Elliott, Time, 6 Dec. 2022
• Theirs is not really a movement but a discursive stance with almost no relation to the actual contours of politics.
  — Sam Kriss, Harper's Magazine, 16 Oct. 2023
• Theirs is not really a movement but a discursive stance with almost no relation to the actual contours of politics.
  — Michelle Orange, Harper's Magazine, 3 Nov. 2023
• Yet, out of the film's loose, discursive structure, an expansive view of the subject's eclectic output, and of the thought that goes into each new piece, comes together.
  — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2017
• The film evokes this sense of perpetual migration with lyrical imagery and a discursive approach to storytelling.
  — Emily Buder, The Atlantic, 14 Oct. 2017
• The demonstration began, and Ahmed spoke first, doing his best to distill his discursive style into something closer to call-and-response.
  — Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker, 2 Dec. 2023
• Finally, there’s Keane’s bitter, discursive first-person commentary about writing the whole thing.
  — Kaleb Horton, Rolling Stone, 15 Sep. 2021
• Nunn tends to publish the more discursive material on Mondays and straighter restaurant writing on Fridays.
  — Sam Knight, The New Yorker, 8 Mar. 2023
• Lillian’s death in 2015 seems to have been a primary catalyst for this garrulous and discursive memoir.
  — Dwight Garner, New York Times, 13 June 2017
• In their discursive world, good white ladies are not supposed to scream that Black lives matter or point out the bigotry inherent in a system of law enforcement that started with slave patrols.
  — Linda Tirado, The New Republic, 4 June 2020