Gongxian Zhao English Final Project

I am Gongxian Zhao, a sophomore student majoring in Biological Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Over 14 years of academic study, I have written extensively. Yet this semester brings me many different experiences in the realm of writing. On this website, I will guide you to three of my major works done this semester.

1. Image Essay: I analyze George Grosz’s painting Suicide, which was created during the Weimar Republic era. In this assignment, I learned how to write a very thorough description of an artwork and connect it to a detailed historical analysis, which I have never done before.
2. Creating Resistance project: Pairing up with the other 2 group members, we create a zine to resist against misinformation. The zine’s target audience is anyone who uses social media and the internet as sources of information. Therefore, in this assignment, I need to learn to make my writing less academic, more effective, and funnier.
3.  Artifact Essay: I analyze the song Wind of Change created by the Scorpions. Specifically, I try to determine whether Wind of the Change has the potential to cause political change. Throughout the project, I conducted research on the history of the Berlin Wall, song lyric analysis, and other historical contextualizations of the Soviet Union. This is a rare experience to connect music and history together in a research paper.

Throughout the revision, I find myself improved in some ways. I use more precise language to describe an image rather than vague adjectives. Integrating a quote from a secondary resource was also another difficulty I tackled this semester. In my future career as a biological science major, I will integrate the research skills I learned in this class into my scientific paper. In addition, image descriptions would be helpful for diagram and table descriptions, which are widely used in scientific papers.