Descriptive And Prescriptive Claims

  The different between descriptive and prescriptive claims are that descriptive claim is about how thing is and the prescriptive claim is about how thing should be. For most of the time prescriptive claims will appear to be moral or judgement claims. The claim will most likely to contain the word "good," "better," "bad," "worse," or some other words that are value judgement. However, sometime a prescriptive claim can sound similar to the descriptive claim. For example, a friend might say that sitting down for a long period of  time is bad for you. This is actually a prescriptive claim since the sentence carries the assumption that we should not sit for a long time. Some might agree with the speaker but no one know that what standard the speaker has in mind. The phase "long period of time" can varies by a lot from 2 hours till 10 hours or even more. Until the listeners know what is the speaker's standard of "long period of time" is, we cannot assume what the speaker is trying to say.