digressive
/dʌɪˈɡrɛsɪv
/adjective
Characterized by digression; tending to depart from the subject: a digressive account...
- Each was a long, highly literary, digressive, and polemical account of the failure of the colonists to make good their British patrimony.
- His characters live untidy lives and often fall into digressive daydreams, so troubled are their souls.
- In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, - and at the same time.
Derivatives
digressively
/ adverb ...- Whether digressively or directly, at a walk or at a run, the motion is on the ground and by foot, putting its weight part by part onto the terrain to be covered.
- Even while he appears to be ambling digressively, he sets a stiff pace; there are few concessions to readers wanting assumptions restated or conclusions underlined.
- This reader devoted to the great writer therefore appealingly begins with his later work, when he is in full, digressively brilliant voice writing about Paris.
digressiveness
/ noun ...- For all his digressiveness, he constantly selects and shapes, for he ever desires to maintain control over the emotions that he provokes in his reader.
- It appears to be a specially successful job considering the verbosity and digressiveness of the novel of this writer who, though often brilliant, writes in a highly disorderly way.
- Works such as Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy made digressiveness itself a part of the satire.