WRITING A PERSUASIVE ESSAY

How to Write a Persuasive Essay

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit
Whether for school, persuading your mom to let you have a dog, or persuading your boss for that extra raise, everyone needs and should know how to write a persuasive essay. It’s actually not as difficult as it seems.

Steps

1. Give yourself time. Trying to cram an entire 5 paragraph persuasive essay within 20 minutes is not a good idea. Allow yourself enough time to brainstorm, write, and proofread.
2. Brainstorm. Writing a persuasive essay is very much like writing an ordinary paper. Of course, before you begin, you have to come up with a good solid view, a foundation which you can base your entire paper on. It’s best if you pick a topic which you strongly believe in. That way, you can defend your ideas better and make your paper sound a lot more convincing.
3. Start off your essay by stating your views. Don’t get too specific. Leave the details for later. Just lay out your main idea and opinion.
4. Make body paragraphs. At minimum, write three paragraphs for the body of the essay. Each paragraph should cover a main point to back up your argument and idea. Each paragraph should include three smaller points defending each larger point. If this sounds confusing just look at the diagram:
   • First sentence, Main point: Cats are easy to look after.
   • Second sentence, Minor point 1: They are very independent.
   • Third Sentence, Minor point 2: Cats are very clean and hygienic.
   • Fourth Sentence, Minor point 3: Cats are very intelligent.
   • Your last sentence should be a transition to the next paragraph to help keep reading smooth.
5. Finish off with a conclusion (last sentence). Restate each of your points and end the whole paper with a very well written sentence that leaves the reader with an imprint of the essay. Make it something that they won’t easily forget.
6. Proofread. Use the spell checker on your computer to check the spellings words (if applicable). Also check your paper twice for yourself to make sure the content makes sense. Have others check your paper. The more the essay is checked, the easier it is to find mistakes.

Tips

• Make sure you know your audience. Stick to a certain tone, whether it’s formal, informal, funny, pleading, etc.
• Be aware of the possible counter-arguments that would go against what you are trying to say. Only address these points in your essay if you have good ways to respond to them.
• Avoid the use of personal pronouns such as “I” or “you”. This takes away from your writing’s professional touch.
• Use synonyms. Having the same word over and over will place a toll on the reader’s nerves. Mix it up a bit.
• When restating, do not duplicate any sentence. Your audience will not skip over any part, so there isn’t a need for stressing the same point over and over.
• Make each sentence count. Adding extra sentences will not drive your point home. Keep the essay clear by keeping it concise.

Warnings

• Don’t make it too long. Long papers are not always impressive, but just plain boring. Stick to a limit of 500 words or so.

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• How to Write a Composition/Story
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Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Write a Persuasive Essay. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

RIGHT TO JUDGE THE LAW "JURY NULLIFICATION" OF A HATED LAW. READ ELEVEN, BELOW.

How to Get Out of Jury Duty

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit
While it is your civic duty to attend jury duty, there are some secrets to getting out of the obligation. Generally, citizens are randomly selected to perform jury duty, and just because you are selected for jury duty does not mean that you will actually sit on a jury. If you follow these simple steps you very well may get out of even showing up for jury duty. If you still have to go however, you will certainly limit your duty to one day—no attorney or judge will allow you to sit on a jury they are involved with.

Steps

1. In many states, it is possible to demonstrate that you are unable to serve on a jury for financial reasons. Proof of employment and/or wages, in addition to comprehensive financial statements and the previous years taxes should all be brought to court with you on the first day you report to jury duty. If you can persuade the judge that it is unfeasible for you to miss work, you will have lost only one day of your time. Lying here would be inadvisable.
2. Request a change of date. Nearly all federal, state and local jury selection processes are computerized. Your name comes up on a list and a notice of jury duty is automatically sent to your registered address. When you receive your notice, mark on the jury form that you need special accommodations and that you cannot make the requested attendance date. Make sure to note that you are quite sick, going out of town, studying for the bar, or planning on joining the military. Any accepted excuse will likely set your next jury summons back at least a year. If you have children, don’t be afraid to use that card.
3. If you can get a change of date, ask for December. In December, there is a far greater chance that most trials will be delayed or moved, and you may never actually get called in, while at the same time you are still fulfilling your civic duty.
4. In California, there is a loophole you can take advantage of to get out of serving on a trial if you aren’t able to get out of being called for jury service. This is significant, as trials in CA often last 10 - 20 days. In the voir dire (evaluation of potential candidates for a jury on a specific trial), the judge will ask if anyone has any significant reason not to serve on a trial (which can last for weeks in CA). Most excuses will not be accepted, but some, such as medical excuses, will get you dismissed. One tack to try: Explain to the judge that you have a pressing, pressing commitment in the next week or two, and that you would be happy to re-schedule your jury service two weeks hence because of this very pressing work or personal commitment. Most judges will agree to let you come back and repeat jury service in two weeks, even if your commitment doesn’t rise to the level needed for him to just let you go scot-free. However (and here’s the catch), by state law you will have served your jury service already merely be dint of having appeared for a day, even without being selected for trial. When you return to the jury room, instead of getting your jury service rescheduled they will hand you piece of paper certifying you have completed it. Voila!
5. Attend jury duty if you don’t come up with an acceptable excuse. Again, don’t be afraid to make phone calls, write letters, and personally ask the clerk of court for a waiver of appearance—it will often be granted. However, if you can’t get out of the initial appearance it is generally the law that you MUST attend. Don’t worry, though. Just because you attend “jury duty” does not mean that you will actually end up on a jury.
6. If you do not wish to be seated on a jury panel, come to the courtroom laden with as many preconceived notions and unwavering opinions as possible. If an attorney asks you whether you can be objective, say no. If it is a criminal case, make sure to stress that you think all defendants are guilty and deserve to be hung—even if for a moving violation or shoplifting. Or, alternatively, claim a vehement anti-prosecution bias-all police lie at all times, all defendants are innocent, etc. Attorneys want objective evaluators who will listen to the facts of the case.
7. One thing that may work is to state that you are racist. They would not want a person who would chose sides depending on race, but on facts presented.
8. Remember that a finding in favor of the plaintiff in civil trials requires a preponderance of the evidence, whereas a conviction in a criminal case demands that the prosecution prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt—a much more stringent standard. Make sure that you go into jury duty acting as though you know everything before even hearing the case—the more stubborn you can appear, the better.
9. A more respectable alternative to the above “play stupid” tactics is to “play smart.” Many attorneys wants jurors whom they can persuade one way or the other. Try to demonstrate education, intelligence, and logical reasoning. In many jurisdictions, lawyers, judges, and police officers are categorically barred from jury duty because they are too informed on the subject. (In California this applies only to the latter.) Similarly, doctors are almost always excused from malpractice cases, bankers from embezzlement cases, etc. It is not, however, unheard-of for a sitting judge to be seated as a juror.
10. At almost any cost, try to avoid being seated on a grand jury. Duty on a grand jury means that you will be hearing assistant district attorneys asking for indictments on a number of cases over an extended period of time. Grand jury duty is both long and tedious.
11. If actually selected to be on a jury, you are likely to be asked to swear to find a verdict solely on the basis of the facts presented in court. Decline to swear this on the grounds that the jury has a right to find a verdict as they see fit. Mention the right of a jury to “veto.” This right is called “jury nullification.” In short, it allows a jury to return a verdict of “innocent” when the accused is clearly guilty, because the jury disagrees with the law that was broken. You probably want to read up on this before your jury duty. This is a right held by the juror and affirmed by the Supreme Court, but one that both prosecutors and judges usually deeply loathe, if they even acknowledge its existence. You will almost certainly be excused from the jury for holding unacceptable views, but if not, you will be better prepared for the experience from your research.
12. If you are a student and being a student in your state (i.e. CA) doesn’t excuse you, you can request your service schedule to coincide with your next break (winter, spring, summer). The call center can still authorize this even if you have gone beyond the 1 year postponement limit, they will say it will be your final postponement.

Tips

• Always follow the law when dealing with the judicial system, but cop a serious attitude at the same time. You need to present yourself as unstable and stubborn to avoid any and all jury duty.
• If you don’t want to be a poor sport, consider sitting on a jury as an educational and learning experience. The worst part about jury duty is waiting to be selected and going through the process of voir dire (where attorneys question potential jurors).

Warnings

• Never ignore a call for jury duty. Failure to attend jury duty can result in fines, suspension of a driver’s license, or in some cases, criminal charges.
• While lawyers may put you to sleep, actual jury duty may instill in you a keen appreciation for civic duty and participation in the judicial process!
• NOTE: Doing some of the things mentioned here may get you jail time and possibly a criminal record. Proceed at your own risk.

Related wikiHows

• How to Enjoy Jury Service
• How to Address a Letter to a Government Official
• How to Write a Law Essay

Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Get Out of Jury Duty. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

By Krakie!! I've Done IT Again!!!

That’s “IT” as in “Information Technology”. I had a problem with a Canon iC D800 Printer installed on a network. It was one of those damned MS Windows errors: The instruction at “0x77f41d24” referenced memory at “0x00000000.” The memory could not be written.  (That’s the exact message, but the numbers are not exactly the same - so don’t anybody go crazy out there looking that up - an exact search in fourteen search engines for the right numbers came up with nothing anyway)

I worked on the problem for three hours and then I called Canon - twice. They told me to go to Microsoft’s site and said the answer might be there. I did. It wasn’t. I stayed with the XP Professional SP3 and the Canon iC D800 for five more hours until 10 pm and drove my 50 miles home. That weekend I remoted in and worked on it another five hours - and Canon said they would send me the “latest” drivers on disk. The next Thursday I got the disk and drove 50 miles out there again and worked on it again, opened the “latest” drivers disk plastic bag they sent me (not yet available on the web, they assured me) and it was dated 2004… which means that this printer has been on thousands or tens of thousands of XP computers for at least four years (and there have been people having this problem before and nobody ever found a solution to put in their database) - NOBODY at Canon could figure out how to solve this problem, and the same with Microsoft. After installation of the updated drivers - the original error message came back again! I had fixed it to the point where at least it had stopped giving me the error message and stopped crashing Explorer every time I tried to print - and now it was back to both again.

Well, fifty miles each way with my gas guzzling 15 miles per gallon van meant I’d already spent over 12 gallons of gas on this problem - eating into my contract - so, once again, I did it by myself. For a few hours I had thought that it must be that DEP was causing the problem. Only how to turn that sucker off??? Data Execution Prevention has no button or setting to turn it off! I checked around for a while though and came across a totally different problem on the web, having nothing to do with “the memory cannot be written” but it did have to do with turning off DEP which is what I wanted.

Ok - so how to turn off DEP: Go to the boot.ini file, right click it and take away the “read only” attribute so you can edit it. Open boot.ini with notepad and remove the word NO from NOexecute=optin.

Save and reboot and there will be no more DEP running, and your Canon iC D800 will print like a dream with no problems whatever.

What shitty coding. A printer crashing explorer because DEP won’t let it work, and nobody at Microsoft in four years of getting “Do you want to send this error message to Microsoft?” had a patch to fix it. What a shame - but now VISTA is upon us - thrust upon us - ready or not, with Microsoft ready to ream us   a - g - a - i - n !!!  Has anyone else wondered at how this planned obsolescence has made them filthy rich and not helped us one bit?  When I type my letters I still use the same 26 letter keyboard, same 0-9 numbers, and still use my fingers to type - so whoopdie doo what new features they include - it all comes out looking the same.

An error occurred copying file dtscsi.sys to C:\$WIN_NT$\dtscsi.sys

I ran into this problem last week trying to upgrade Windows XP Home to Pro. The error message during the copying of setup files to the C:\WIN_NT$\ folder “An error occurred copying file dtscsi.sys to C:\$WIN_NT$\dtscsi.sys” came up and when I told it to “skip” the file, upon reboot, the system couldn’t get the last part of the Windows upgrade setup to load and it hung.

Don’t worry folks - I HAVE an answer here :)

Nobody on the internet had the fix for this problem. MicroSuck had no answer for me. eMachines also had no answer for how to solve the problem and the “easiest” solution they all came up with was to re-install windows Home from scratch and upgrad from there - however many hourse THAT would take! XP Home, then XP Pro, then do all the patches and service packs and user configurations and network reconfigurations (since this was also the file server and everyone was mapped to the shares) - then reinstall the KIP Printer and drivers, re-install AutoCad, re-install, re-install, reconfigure… Screw THAT!!! Here’s how you fix it:

The system can’t be upgraded because the dtscsi.sys file is being used by something else - probably something that emulates a SCSI drive (SCSI = Small Computer System Interface). Usually it’s going to be a virtual drive system program like “DAEMON Tools” or something. Even if you uninstall the application / service at fault, you’ll still have the problem. So I’ll tell you what I did after this shortened version since I think you can reduce the steps to this to make it quicker:

1) Start the upgrade and tell it to skip the file dtscsi.sys and when it shuts down to restart just turn off the machine and remove the hard drive.

2) Set it as slave and put it into another computer and then copy the dtscsi.sys file from the C:\Windows\System32 folder and put the C:\$WIN_NT$ folder. Take out the drive, set it back to Master or Cable Select and replace it in the original computer you wanted to upgrade.  [NOTE:  If you think you can boot into safe mode and copy the file directly I don’t think it will work - booting into ANYTHING Windows at all from the original OS will probably not work, as trying to upgrade during Safe Mode ALSO did not work and had the sytem locking up the dtscsi.sys with the hal.dll]

4) Now let it reboot into the installation and it should work fine.

Easy, right? It worked for me. If you don’t see the C:\$WIN_NT$.~BT folder then you did it wrong. When windows does the upgrade it removes this folder and all it’s contents if you quit the upgrade, and after it finishes a successful upgrade. I suspect that if you were to copy this folder and the setup boot.ini you might be able to upgrade any XP Home to Pro because the product Key has to be put in before you can even reach this stage - though I’m not sure that it would work because I’m not interested in trying it. I don’t think it would validate however.

NOW - IF THIS DOESN’T WORK FOR SOME REASON then you can try it my original way as I was in the process of discovery.

1) I made a copy of the dtscsi.sys file from another computer that had this file and I did it by unplugging the HD and slaving it to the comptuer I wanted to upgrade.

2) Then I copied the file to the root of the C:\ drive.

3) I then removed the slaved drive and rebooted the computer I wanted to upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro and went into F8 safe mode with command prompt only (you probably can do it using the GUI, but I wanted to get this over with fast).

4) From the command prompt I did a few cd.. cd.. cd.. to bring me back to the root of the C:\ drive.

5) Then, from the C:\ drive I did a CD C:\$WIN_NT$.~BT and deleted the 0 byte dtscsi.sys file that was there (the one that “couldn’t” be copied) with the command: del dtscsi.sys

6) Then I did a cd.. to bring me back out to the root of the C:\ drive

7) Then I performed a copy of the dtscsi.sys file (about 217k) from the C:\ Drive to the C:\$WIN_NT$.~BT by typing in the command: copy c:\dtscsi.sys C:\$WIN_NT$.~BT

At that point I restarted the system and let it go and it upgraded without a hitch. It’s reasonable to assume though that my solution at top will work even faster. If not, you can go the long route here to make it work.

If you don’t HAVE a way to slave your drive and get a copy of the dtscsi.sys file from another computer I have one on my site zipped up to make it easy for you. You can download it from this link: http://www.thebrokenmold.com/dtscsi.zip

Good luck! With so many people out there on the internet unable to solve this problem and even Microsoft having no solution - this is not the FIRST time I’ve done what nobody else seems to have been able to do. So how come I’m not rich???

Windows XP Media Center Sucks. Vista Sucks.

With Vista as the print server (Vista Print Server - aka Vista Sucks) and XP Media Center as the print client the printer I setup on the XP Media Center (henceforth XP Sucks) the printer magically disappears from the list of networked printers and equally magically turns itself into a local printer on LPT1 over and over again.  There’s no such thing as magic - but there are nightmares.  This is another Microsoft nightmare.

Which OS is at fault?  XP Media Center?  Vista Sucks?  The answer is: Microsoft SUCKS.  As a straight platform Win2K was the BEST OS Microsuck ever came out with.  Win2k is lightweight, fast and relieble.  Configure it once and it stays configured, maintains its connections, doesn’t obfuscate or hide controls and is granular enough to be manageable on a micro level.

As for Microsoft software, well, let’s just say that if the Vatican in Rome programmed a “ROMAN WORLD” Operating System I would not run down to my local vatican software store and load it up with everything “vatican-only” ROMAN WORLD SOFTWARE any more than I would buy everything I own from Mary Kay or Tupperware if I had the choice.