Prescription and description

In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for a language. A milder form of prescriptivism makes "recommendations" for good language useage. This is in contrast to the description of a language, which simply describes how that language is used in practice.

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Outside the field of linguistics, these terms are used in a more general sense to indicate whether a statement is merely describing a state of affairs or presenting it as desirable. For example, "a man should take responsibility for his actions" is a prescriptive statement; "some men don't take responsibility for their actions" is a descriptive one. Some prescriptive statements are phrased in the language of description: for instance, in many contexts "a man takes responsibility for his actions" would be understood as saying that a man ought to take responsibility for his actions.

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