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.
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.
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.
Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.
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.
At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.
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.
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.
I'm very prescriptive about who I work with.
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. ".
