A formal word, mostly from school, law, and social science, for talk that sets a rule — or treats a rule as the right way to behave. A normative sentence does not just report what people do; it says what they ought to do. “You should keep your word” is normative; “Many people break promises” is not. Teachers speak of normative grammar when they mean the tidy “correct” forms, as against the messy ways people actually talk. In ethics, a normative claim is about good and bad, not about what happens to be common. Though actually everyday speakers sometimes use it as a heavy synonym of normal, “the usual thing,” and that is a little loose: normal follows the pattern, while normative tries to lay the pattern down. You will rarely hear it in a shop; you will meet it in essays and policy papers. It can name a tone as well as a rule: a normative culture is one that quietly tells you how to act.