I think you need extra tutoring.

Why buy the image when you can link to it for free?

I think Lionel de Souza needs extra tutoring with regard to how to write an expository argument:

Other than being used for trysts and immoral purposes, rooms at budget hotels are also used by gambling syndicates to operate illegal “casinos”, drug addicts to abuse drugs, fugitives of the law who dare not return home for fear of being arrested, etc.

— Lionel de Souza, TODAYWhy budget hotels must be reined in

If this were an essay he submitted to me for grading, my comments would be as follows:

Lionel, where is your evidence? What makes you an authority on budget hotels?

I know you are a retired cop, but I don’t think you’d be privy to what goes on in budget hotels in this day and age – unless you hang out at budget hotels yourself.

Even if that were the case, citing personal experience is not always credible when it comes to making expository arguments.

Actually he needs a lot more help with his writing (look at the amount of fallacies in the letter!) but I can’t afford the time.

Besides, people seldom buy the cow if they can get the milk for free(Though I must clarify that I always make it a point to buy the milk if I get to sample it first and I like what I taste.)

Anyway Lionel, if you do read this, and you like the taste of my milk, my rates are $100/hr – you know my name, look up the number.

The Effort Effect.

Who said 'can't'? Someone else is doing something someone else said was impossible. Try trying.

According to a Stanford psychologist, you’ll reach new heights if you learn to embrace the occasional tumble.

(via)

~

This was quite meaningful for me because of two portions, one of which was this:

Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they’d hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while—so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized … that the difference lay in the kids’ goals. “The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something,” Dweck says, and “learning goals” inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than “performance goals.”

It’s helped me to realise why I took a certain something too seriously – I had been too focused on performance as opposed to learning, considering the stage I was/am at. I guess it was also, in part, due to mismanaged expectations. But better to learn this later than never.

The second thing which I found meaningful was this:

Dweck’s study showed that praising children for intelligence, rather than for effort, sapped their motivation. But more disturbingly, 40 percent of those whose intelligence was praised overstated their scores to peers. “We took ordinary children and made them into liars,” Dweck says. Similarly, Enron executives who’d been celebrated for their innate talent would sooner lie than fess up to problems and work to fix them.

Am going to start saying ‘good effort’ instead of just ‘good’ from now on!