'precepts' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when you want to refer to a general rule intended to regulate behaviour or thought. Example sentence: The precepts of the school created an environment of discipline and respect.
Oxford's Jonathan Glover sought to apply moral precepts to everyday life in his excellent book, Causing Death and Saving Lives.
He said the convictions were "most disturbing" to Washington because they were part of a succession of prosecutions of political activists and summary death sentences that are "fundamentally incompatible with the basic precepts of human rights and democratic governance".
The speech captures the irony of the contradiction between what the real historical treatment of Negroes after slavery and emancipation has been, in reality, in contrast to the principles and precepts enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and bill of rights to our constitution and embodied in the Civil War Freedmans Bureau established in 1865.
Arguing that evolution was "purposeful, not for humans but for the planet", he set forth 66 precepts for "right living," warning against being "blinded by science which is itself a faith and has become an enemy.
America's greatest strength is its elasticity: France is the land of French people, Germany the land of Germans, but America belongs to an ideal rather than a people, and that ideal of equal treatment is expansive enough to comprise and accommodate itself to anyone willing to live according to its precepts.
The playing field is levelled and laid out according to the best neoclassical precepts.
The commune, whose thousand or so residents are almost all progeny of the male founders, follows the precepts of the breakaway Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints based in Utah.
As he and his partner climbed in accordance with the strict precepts of alpinism, Simpson could not help but fret over the commercialisation of Everest and its human and environmental costs.
The more his ideological allies stoke anti-Americanism, the harder it will be for Mr Khamenei to forgo revolutionary precepts.
AN ICONIC retailer is ruled by a brilliant yet absolutist boss who, contemptuous of corporate-governance precepts, becomes chairman and chief executive.
The Communist Party, heavily pragmatic, is unlikely to adopt the moral precepts at the heart of classical Chinese philosophy.
