How to Use expository in a Sentence

expository

adjective

• Enlarge / One of the only expository cutscenes in the game comes right at the start.
  — Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, 23 Feb. 2022
• The photo is the photo but the need to proclaim the apparent deception is part and parcel of the expository nature of her work.
  — Michelle Tea, Harper's magazine, 22 June 2019
• But a good expository text would explain why the boy is sad, and how feelings can appear differently on the outside.
  — Kristen Rogers, CNN, 15 Apr. 2020
• You are not being shown so much as told a story, propelled by great bursts of expository dialogue.
  — cleveland, 9 Oct. 2020
• More generally, the imprint of the IPTA is all over his aesthetic; his dialogue, for instance, has the snap and expository tone of the stage.
  — Ratik Asokan, The New York Review of Books, 25 Jan. 2020
• There are no clumsy expository scenes of men and women in white lab coats trying to convince the audience that such a thing is possible.
  — Mike Scott, NOLA.com, 17 Jan. 2018
• There are times when the expository notes outshine the stories, opening up new philosophical worlds that the narratives failed to do.
  — Sheon Han, The New Republic, 23 Feb. 2021
• From the first Avengers onward, each single movie has been obliged to carry a narrative and expository burden that can threaten to eclipse the film's discrete purpose.
  — Angela Watercutter, WIRED, 26 Apr. 2018
• Stuhlbarg isn’t the only performer let down by Dopesick’s expository instincts.
  — Jen Chaney, Vulture, 15 Oct. 2021
• Deaths and major confrontations pass by in a couple of minutes, while more expository scenes linger for longer than necessary.
  — Nicolette Munoz, Los Angeles Times, 14 Sep. 2019
• But their lack of chemistry, coupled with the absence of expository messages, instead leads to confusion over why Nick would bother with Frances, and vice versa.
  — Sonia Rao, Washington Post, 18 May 2022
• There's an art to making expository dialogue sing, and Strong accomplishes it with the aid of the animators.
  — Christian Holub, EW.com, 29 June 2021
• Both pay lip service to it in clunky expository speeches that conveniently arise.
  — Courtney Howard, Variety, 29 Mar. 2022
• For some expository reason that the show does nothing to foreshadow or explain, Lucianne grows tender.
  — Amanda Whiting, Vulture, 28 Sep. 2021
• Wiest plays a prison educator who holds her sons in contempt; her acute awareness of just how precisely her child has failed his potential and his town comes out in bits of expository dialogue.
  — Daniel D'addario, Variety, 10 Nov. 2021
• And the most deadly and unexpected moment of the book is never explained or justified, even when the big baddie delivers his expository speech.
  — Alex Davies, WIRED, 27 Aug. 2019
• Later, seeing Reynolds and Ruffalo trade fours doing Aaron Sorkin-style walk-and-talks full of expository blah-blah is satisfying in a different way.
  — Michael Phillips, chicagotribune.com, 10 Mar. 2022
• The movie steps early and often into the familiar potholes of expository dialogue: telling, telling, telling, not showing.
  — Michael Ordoña, Los Angeles Times, 24 Nov. 2020
• His diary entries tend to be flatly expository, lending his account the feel of a chronicle rather than a genuine narrative.
  — Mike Fischer, Detroit Free Press, 29 July 2017
• Where the 2017 posts were filled with Socratic questions, the later posts were more declarative and expository, with heavy use of exclamation points and words written in all capital letters.
  — New York Times, 19 Feb. 2022
• In any case, the expository details of this dazzling history are less likely to be lost on Britons who never studied the American Revolution.
  — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 5 Jan. 2018
• The handful of action scenes, for all their mortal dangers, come and go with an expository brevity and an elusive, abstracted physicality to match.
  — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 8 Aug. 2019
• Growing Up Female is the most didactic in the series, using an expository voiceover to relate the bare facts of patriarchal oppression, and to organize its talking heads by theme.
  — Phoebe Chen, The New York Review of Books, 27 June 2020
• The monologue, with all its informational and expository weight, is the medium of the public-service announcement, the press-conference preamble, the vague and less than helpful missive from the C.D.C. Enough, already, of being told.
  — Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 12 Apr. 2021
• Polley, who also wrote the screenplay, is sparing with expository details.
  — Esther Zuckerman, Time, 14 Sep. 2022
• Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train reveals a young playwright's awkwardness with its overwritten passages and reliance on expository monologues.
  — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter, 24 Oct. 2017
• No expository dialogue about not being able to speak Spanish.
  — Los Angeles Times, 13 June 2021
• This is not to suggest that Ms. Kennedy, at 86, has made new concessions to narrative conventions or expository clarity.
  — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 30 Jan. 2018
• Kostova is a clearheaded, elegant writer with a sneaky gift for incorporating the history and culture of a place into the nooks and crannies of a book that never feels bossy or expository.
  — Chelsea Cain, New York Times, 26 May 2017
• In the show’s pivotal fourth episode, though, it’s Luis Gerardo Méndez who swoops in with a deftly funny performance in a part that could easily devolve into expository nonsense, but instead anchors the entire show.
  — Caroline Framke, Variety, 28 July 2022

Last Updated: 17 Jul 2024