Who Was She Libby Copeland Analysis

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Libby Copeland, in “Who Was She? A DNA Test Only Opened New Mysteries,” explores the mystery of Alice Collins Plebuch’s family heritage through the journey that DNA testing and hard work reveals. In this essay I will be analyzing how Libby Copeland uses tone and sentence structure to share Alice Plebuch’s story with others. In this article Libby Copeland does an excellent job at making the writing relate to the readers. This article is about somebody else’s family mystery and somebody else’s journey, but Copeland makes us feel as though we are a part of it. The article is filled with facts and information, but Copeland doesn’t overwhelm us with it. She makes the article interesting; she uses diagrams and pictures to help explain things, or …show more content…

“To solve the mystery of her identity, she needed more help than any DNA testing company could offer. After all, genetic testing gives you the what, but not the why.” This sets the tone for the long journey that Plebuch is going to have to go through to find out where she came from, and it keeps us eager to find out. After finding out that Nolan was not her real cousin, Plebuch felt defeated. As a cost of coming closer to the truth, Plebuch lost the bloodline connection to one of her favorite people. “‘I really lost all my identity,’ Plebuch says. ‘I felt adrift. I didn’t know who I was – you know, who I really was.’” This sets the tone for how devastating this journey was becoming to be, but also the determination she felt to figure it all out, to figure out who she was. After cracking the case and finding out that her Jewish father was switched at the hospital and went home with an Irish family, while an Irish baby went home with her fathers Jewish family. Plebuch was grateful to figure out what happened, but also could not help herself from thinking of what her fathers life would have been like if he hadn’t been switched and gone home with his real family. “If not for the switch, Jim would have been raised in an intact home. He almost certainly would have completed high school and might have done something with his gift for mathematics.” Plebuch came to terms with everything, and in the end was grateful. If not for the switch, she would have never

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