You suspect a patient has expressive aphasia. Before revealing the answer, decide how you would assess for this.

Test comprehension separately from production, confirming the patient generally understands what is said to them and knows what they want to say, despite struggling, sometimes severely, to produce it. Listen for characteristic features of production difficulty: mispronounced or abbreviated longer words, the clipped, 'telegram style' quality produced by omission of small words such as articles, and, in severe cases, speech reduced to a few words, expletives, or fixed utterances delivered with different intonation to convey different meanings. Note the person's evident frustration and awareness of the difficulty, together with preserved comprehension, since this combination distinguishes expressive aphasia from most psychiatric causes of reduced speech, including mutism.