0 saying exactly what must happen, especially by giving an instruction or making a rule:
Most teachers think the government's guidelines on homework are too prescriptive.
1 tending to say what someone should do or how something should be done:
To the modern scientific mind, these two prescriptive statements are of different types.
But as with all stages of development models there is a lurking danger that they will be used in a simplistic and prescriptive way.
It is through communicational acts that prescriptive rules for action are propagated, affirmed, contested, or rejected.
Perhaps one of the reasons why teachers tend to focus on grammatically oriented lessons is the availability of prescriptive grammars and textbooks.
Linguists have been confused by campaigns against sexist language: are they prescriptive conspiracies or a kind of natural change?
It seems that they can only describe a language - otherwise they could be criticized by their colleagues for being prescriptive.
This brief essay is not intended to be narrowly predictive, or even prescriptive.
The role of education, prescriptive grammars, and attitudes/evaluations (including variation used for characterization in literary texts after 1700) is sadly neglected.
