From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishprescriptivepre‧scrip‧tive /prɪˈskrɪptɪv/ adjective 1 MUSTsaying how something should or must be done, or what should be done prescriptive teaching methods2 SLLstating how a language should be used, rather than describing how it is used OPP descriptive prescriptive grammar3 → prescriptive right —prescriptively adverb
Examples from the Corpus
prescriptive• For while there are detailed teacher's notes provided, the Student's Books themselves are not at all prescriptive.• Proponents of what are inevitably radical solutions must be unfashionably prescriptive.• The style and format of teachers' guides vary from the most detached to the most prescriptive.• For the history of linguistic analysis in the West is overwhelmingly a prescriptive and overtly a political one.• But comprehensive data collection ran ahead of a capacity for meaningful analysis, and prescriptive content was disappointing.• I do not intend to turn this into a prescriptive handbook.• Social capacities are normative or prescriptive, in that they include responsibilities for whose discharge the actor can be praised or criticized.• Essentially feminism is a perspective rather than a particular set of prescriptive values. 