Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. How do the authors create a tone that develops their
claim and purpose?
For an African, whether you were sent to the
Caribbean or South America, you were now part of
the sugar machine. And it did not much matter where
your ship landed. You could be working the fertile
fields of Brazil or the hills of Jamaica; the brutal cycle
of making sugar was much the same.
If the terrain was not too rocky or hilly, you might be
part of a group of slaves who drove teams of oxen to
draw plows across the fields. On rougher ground, you
were sent out to clear a space five inches deep and
five feet square. Then you dug holes for the cane
shoots in the cleared squares. You needed to work
quickly and without stopping. Overseers watched
closely to make sure of that, beating slaves who did
not carve out at least twenty-eight holes an hour on
one French island. The painstaking work had just one
aim: to plant a crop that would end up taking the of
O by using words with negative connotations, such
as brutal
O by describing the land with positive connotations,
such as fertile
O by describing the land with negative connotations,
such as rocky
O by using words with neutral connotations, such as
plant