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Denisha Fuller
Final Reflective Essay
UWRT 1101
Dr. Arnold

During the first part of this semester, I considered myself a pretty good writer. The
reason I thought this way was because I had always gotten pretty good scores on my papers in
high school. However, after taking this course, I realize that the only reason I was good at that
type of writing was because I was really good at fitting someone elses mold of what a good
writer was, and write based off of what someone else thought was good writing. I didnt know
how to be a creative writer and make it something unique and something of my own, and
although I did make good grades on those papers, that doesnt mean that actually writing it came
easy to me. In the Bible, Romans 8:18 states, For I consider that the sufferings of this present
time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. To me, this quote can
take on a lot of different meanings. For one thing, it more than likely is talking about actual
suffering in a biblical sense and how even though a person is suffering now, once they put their
faith into God, their past sufferings will never be worth comparing to the glory of God that will
be bestowed upon them. However, when you think of it in a sense of writing, you can think of
how even though you constantly make writing mistakes in your papers in a way that youre
suffering, if you keep working on it, then those writing mistakes will not be comparable to the
glory you get after you conquer those writing mistakes. In this paper, I will document how the
theme of this scripture has played a key role in my life as I grew in my writing abilities
throughout this semester.

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The first big writing assignment we did in this class was the Literacy Narrative. For me,
this was the easiest assignment and was one that I really enjoyed doing. The reason for this is
because it was based off of something that I love to do, and its something that I do on an almost
daily basis, which is makeup. For a lot of people, when they first start doing makeup, it can be
really challenging and its very common to make a lot of mistakes while you are doing it.
However once you really get the hang of itlike I didit will be very satisfying in the end.
Like everything else that you do in life, you just have to keep working on it to get it to go the
way you want it to. This lesson about makeup also ties into my entire theme about how the
sufferings that you are going through now is not comparable to the glory that will be revealed to
you. When I was writing my Literacy Narrative, I feel like I did a really good job on the first
draft because I did incorporate a lot of detailed information into it and I used a lot of imagery so
that my readers could visualize what was going on. However, I didnt do too good a job of
incorporating dialogue into my first draft, and thats something that I worked on in my final
paper. One example of this is on page five of my final paper where Im talking about how
people had started noticing my makeup and noticing that it was actually really good, and began
calling me pretty and complimenting me on my makeup, and how I responded to their feedback
on it. Another thing that one of my peer reviewers suggested that I do in my final paper was that
everywhere I found myself naming a specific makeup product, I should put what the product is
used for in parenthesis beside the name so that anyone who decides they want to read my paper,
but isnt familiar with makeup will know what I am talking about. I did this with various
makeup products and techniques like blush and contouring.
The second really big writing assignment that we did for our e-portfolio was the Found
Genres Analyses. For me, this assignment was a lot more difficult to do than the Literacy

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Narrative because I decided to do a resume, and its a little harder to do a resume if you havent
had any job experience such as me. The only other resume that I had done prior to this class was
the college resume that I sent off when I applied to college. However, I was not able to find that
resume so that I could use it for reference for making the resume I needed for this class, and also
I feel like even if I was able to find that resume, it wouldnt be put together the way a resume
should be put together to get a job in college. One thing that one of my peer reviewers pointed
out that I didnt do on my rough draft of my resume was put a career objective on it. Handing a
resume off to an employer, and not providing them with a career objective on the resume would
be very confusing for them since they would not know what sort of job I would be looking for
and so after writing that first draft of my resume, I realized how important it is to have a career
objective, and so I made sure to include it into my final draft of my resume.
Now one of the final portions of our e-portfolios was the Ethnography. At first when I
learned about the Ethnography, I had some mixed feelings about it. First of all, I was a little
excited to do it because there was a broad list of things that I could base my Ethnography off of,
and it was especially exciting because at the beginning of starting this Ethnography, I was really
beginning to increase my faith in God, and getting involved with people who were doing the
same thing as me. So with that being said, I based my Ethnography off of the Campus Outreach
Christian organization here on campus. The other reason I had mixed feelings about this
assignment is because we were supposed to be mostly observing the subculture site rather than
getting involved with it, but that was really hard for me. While doing this assignment, I found
myself not really focusing on the assignment while I was with my friends who were a part of
Campus Outreach, but mostly focusing on it after I was done spending time with them and
actually focused on the work. I feel like the whole purpose of the Ethnography assignment was

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to get usthe studentsto learn how to write, but from a different perspective by observing and
interacting with people, rather than just doing some online research about a certain group of
people. One thing I had trouble with in my first draft of my Ethnography was learning how to
put more primary resource evidence into my paper. It wasnt until after we did our peer review
that I figured I could try and interview some people Ive met through Campus Outreach and
incorporate their responses into my paper. Two people whose responses I really used were of
Ebone Rhodes and Whitney Newton. Both of them have been a part of Campus Outreach for at
least two years now, and both of them are pretty religious people, and so I feel like their
responses really captured what the whole meaning of Campus Outreach is.
Overall, every aspect of the e-portfolio has helped me to learn how to write in a different
way. The Literacy Narrative helped me to learn how to write about my life in a way that it was
teaching people about my experience with makeup, and then also teaching me how to write a
little autobiography of myself. The Found Genres Analysis gave me some experience in learning
how to write a resume. Even though I ended up not using the resume I wrote for this class,
because I ended up not applying to the job I was going to apply to at the time, it still gave me
some practice in learning how I should write a resume, and its also given me a reference to look
at the next time I have to write one. Doing the Ethnography really taught me how to observe and
watch people so that I can truly see the importance of a subculture, and why and how the
subculture is so important to its members and the community surrounding them. In the
beginning of this semester, and from doing past writing assignments I realize now that I was
experiencing the first half of what Romans 8:18 says because I was suffering from trying to write
a certain way for other people. But now I see myself beginning the second half of Romans 8:18,

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and as I keep working on my writing throughout the rest of my college career, my writing will
soon be seen as glorious.