Prescriptive Quotes & Sayings

For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary. — Sarah Hall

Agile is not prescriptive and which techniques are appropriate will depend on the context. — Pearl Zhu

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing. — John McWhorter

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You may think things didn't change much after the 60s 'revolution' - but they did. The levels of prescriptive disapproval for anyone who stepped outside the norm receded. — Vashti Bunyan

As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people the underlying value of that which is traditional, that which is prescriptive. — Enoch Powell

Feminism is not here to dictate to you. It's not prescriptive, it's not dogmatic. All we are here to do is give you a choice. If you want to run for President, you can. If you don't, that's wonderful, too. I'm lucky I was raised to believe that my opinion at the dinner table was valuable. My mum and I spoke as loudly as my brothers. — Emma Watson

I don't like to be in delineated moments. I don't like it when your reality feels prescriptive. I don't like Christmas holidays and their pseudo-joy. I don't like New Year's Eve. I don't like anything that feels like an established electromagnetic paradigm is pulling you into it's cliched forebear's footsteps. — Russell Brand

At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive. — Edward Bond

I'm very prescriptive about who I work with. I'm very clear about what I believe. If they believe what I believe I will work with them. If they say things like, "Convince me we should do this." I walk away. — Simon Sinek

The Nurse
Practitioner and an issue of The American Journal for Nurse
Practitioners present a summary of each state's practice
acts as they relate to titling, roles, and prescriptive authority. As of January 2009 (Pearson, 2009; Phillips, 2009), — Teri Moser Woo

I do not make films which are prescriptive, and I do not make films that are conclusive. You do not walk out of my films with a clear feeling about what is right and wrong. They're ambivalent. You walk away with work to do. My films are a sort of investigation. They ask questions ... Sometimes I hear that some [Hollywood] studio is interested in me. Then they discover that this is the guy who works with no script, that there is no casting discussion, no interference, that I have the final cut, and that does it. — Mike Leigh

Universal grammar is about what language is: it is to be distinguished from prescriptive grammars, often distilled in newspaper columns, which tell us what language should be. We are all entitled to our own opinions of what is appropriate, be it in the arrangement of words or flowers - as long as we keep in mind that these are just opinions. The properties of universal grammar linguists have unearthed, however, are a useful defense when language "authorities" try to rationalize their pontifications: none of the don'ts they advertise can be found in the book of universal grammar. — Charles Yang

When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology. — Steven Pinker

The most obvious defensive management ploys are prescriptive Methodologies ("My people are too dumb to build systems without them" ) and technical interference by the manager. Both are doomed to fail in the long run. — Tom DeMarco

Facing sexism and racism and classism and transphobia, there are ways to choose to act in those situations, and there shouldn't be a prescriptive list of things that you have to say. — Kathleen Hanna

A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime. — Sufjan Stevens

The meditation of inceptual thinking concerns us (ourselves) and yet does not. It does not concern us so as to bring out from us the prescriptive determinations; but it does concern us as historical beings and concerns us specifically in the plight of the abandonment by being (at first, decline in the understanding of being, and then forgetting of being). It concerns us, who thus are initially posited in our exposure amid beings; it concerns us in this manner in order that we find our way beyond ourselves to selfhood. — Martin Heidegger

There's good stuff and bad stuff, but you continue on. I'm not prescriptive - I cannot tell anyone else what to do with their lives, and I'm a deeply flawed individual - but this is it. We're all just living it and ... bless us all. — Annie Lennox

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students. — Zadie Smith

I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle. — Russell Kirk

Children find prescriptive reading lists daunting, and they are a dangerous thing to have in schools. — Malorie Blackman

Thus, Moltke believed that the higher the commander's position, the less prescriptive his orders should be to his subordinates. He argued that a large numbers of orders, or verbose orders, could confuse leaders on the commander's true intent. This problem could compound itself through every echelon of command making it difficult for a division, or even a brigade commander, to decipher the reason for the mission.[22] — Major Michael J. Gunther

Prescriptive regulations, such as telling electric utilities what kinds of coal to burn or what kinds of scrubbers to install on their smokestacks, were not only intrusive, they were also grossly inefficient. — Bob Frank

[L]anguage functions best when we mediate between the descriptive and prescriptive influences, changing the rules to better suit some things, but sticking to them for others. — John Wiswell

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112)
They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity? — Gilles Deleuze

we may experience an absolute positive change and do the undone if we shift our thoughts from descriptive thinking to prescriptive thinking — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Burke, and the better men among his disciples, knew that change in society is natural, inevitable, and beneficial; the statesman should not struggle vainly to dam the whole stream of alteration, because then he would be opposing Providence; instead, his duty is to reconcile innovation and prescriptive truth, to lead the waters of novelty into the canals of custom. This accomplished, even though he may seem to himself to have failed, the conservative has executed his destined work in the great mysterious incorporation of the human race; and if he has not preserved intact the old ways he loved, still he has modified greatly the ugly aspect of the new ways. — Russell Kirk

The violence in the Old Testament and New Testament is descriptive. The violence in the Koran is for all time and it is prescriptive. And Mohammed said "I have been made victorious through terror.". — Pamela Geller

How Can You Be Creative If Your Being Prescriptive? — Steven King

A good designer is not the one who best follows the prescriptive steps of a method or technique, or the one who knows "the solution" in advance. Rather, a good designer
can approach, appreciate, and assess a complex and unique design situation. — Jonas Lxf6wgren

I am glad that Zimbabwe and China speak the same language on many issues. We share the same conviction that only a fair, just, and non-prescriptive world order, based on the principles of the charter of the United Nations, can deliver the development we all need. — Robert Mugabe

I'm not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I'm still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it's very black-and-white. — Scott Walker

As I followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not help thinking that the garden in which he had gradually blown to be the flower he was, was an arduous place to rise in. It had such a prescriptive, stiff-necked, long-established, solemn, elderly air. I glanced about the room, which had had its sanded floor sanded, no doubt, in exactly the same manner when the chief waiter was a boy - if he ever was a boy, which appeared improbable; and at the shining tables, where I saw myself reflected, in unruffled depths of old mahogany; and at the lamps, without a flaw in their trimming or cleaning; and at the comfortable green curtains, with their pure brass rods, snugly enclosing the boxes; and at the two large coal fires, brightly burning; and at the rows of decanters, burly as if with the consciousness of pipes of expensive old port wine below; and both England and the law appeared to me to be very difficult indeed to be taken by storm. — Charles Dickens

What's descriptive isn't necessarily prescriptive. — Alistair Begg

A highly worthwhile read with prescriptive examples for authentic sustainability and social justice initiatives at companies - not all about the brand, the celebrity or corporate self-interest (about the book 'Compassion, Inc.'). — Rebecca Aguilar

Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover. — Louis Menand

Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school - to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details. — Joichi Ito

Criticism is concerned with evaluation. There may be evaluative principles implicit in this or that form of theory, but theory in and of itself is not prescriptive. — Paul Fry

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films. — Paul Auster

Doing scrum" is as meaningless (and impossible) as creating an instance of an abstract class. Scrum is a framework for surfacing organizational dysfunction. It is not a process and it is not prescriptive. — Tobias Mayer

The lack of women among the twelve disciples isn't prescriptive or a precedent for exclusion of women any more than the choice of twelve Jewish men excludes Gentile men from leadership. — Sarah Bessey

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right — Aldous Huxley

There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth. — Stephen Nachmanovitch

Earlier, at the first Methodist Conference in 1744, Wesley had advised his helpers and assistants to preach Christ in all his offices and "to declare his law as well as his gospel, both to believers and unbelievers."52 In this counsel, then, the moral law holds great value not only in convicting sinners but also in keeping believers in Christ. That is, Wesley highlighted both the accusatory role of the law, in a way similar to Luther,53 as well as the prescriptive role of this same law, in a way similar to Calvin;54 the one to bring sinners to Christ; the other to keep believers alive in the Lord. — Kenneth J. Collins

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes. — Jonathan Sacks

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe