谢振礼 托福范文: 朋友犯错
TOEFL Independent Writing
ielts360toefl@hotmail.com
Topic:
Do you agree or disagree letting a friend make a mistake is better than saying or doing something that may destroy friendship? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Essay:
Faithful friends are those who dare to let each other know their mistakes. Telling your friends something they do not want to hear takes courage, but it is necessary to do so. However, if you know how to deliver the message, chances are that friendship would be deepened rather than destroyed.
The common belief is that it is advisable to say or do nothing to your friends when they are making a mistake. It is because nobody by nature wants to hear that they are wrong, let alone to be criticized in a manner that often causes feelings of shame. As can be imagined, emotionally shame causes anger easily and almost as easily anger leads to the likely destruction of any long-time friendship, probably never to recover again. This unpleasant situation could happen in real life. So, thinking twice about the undesirable consequences, you might choose to refrain from hurting a friend’s feelings because your friend could not handle the truth that hurts. Besides, since you really value so highly the friendship that you might think that you could not afford to let that friend leave you, so the more considerate option is to keep friendship, as if you were not seeing a serious mistake in the making. What is more, it is a good policy to “mind your own business,” which means that, in order to avoid the friendship from being destroyed, you allow your friend to learn the lesson from a mistake the hard way.
Contrary to that common belief, friendship could be deepened rather than destroyed if you not only point out a true friend’s mistake but also offer a suggested solution to fix it. There is a fine line between destroying and deepening friendship when it comes to telling someone that they are wrong. It depends on how you deliver the message to your friend (and how your friend would take it). For that matter, you should avoid being rigid, uncomfortable, unsympathetic and arrogant when giving a helping hand. More importantly, real friendship is built on trust, and it follows that you need the courage to disagree with your friend, otherwise your friend and you could both be wrong. Best friends need not to agree with each other to make everybody happy. Therefore, if anything, you should say what must be said and do what must be done to deepen the worthy friendship, even at the risk of destroying friendship. In other words, if you see your friend making a mistake and you refuse to warn or correct that person, you are literally not a true friend but an enemy in disguise.
In conclusion, it may be the right thing to say and do something proper to deepen rather than to destroy friendship based o trust. In contrast, it may be the wrong thing to do to be indifferent to your friend who is struggling with overcoming a mistake. Where there is no trust, there is no faithful friendship.
