During our first session, we studied Chinua Achebe's widely read essay," Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Mr Achebe is a native of Nigeria who argues the novel contains a residue "of antipathy to black people." We analyzed the essay to first locate the thesis and then highlighted his support for the argument with an emphasis on paying attention to the writing craftsmanship .Nina then discussed her views on the essay and articulated where she disagreed with the writer. We specifically noted that regardless of one's opinion of the writer's point of view, he validly observes that the Native Africans portrayed in the novel are flat dimensionless figures who appear to serve as backdrops for the European characters. During our next session, we continued our work on essay writing using the five essay writing exercises I prepared. Nina completed an essay on atavism and the symbolism of darkness in the novel. I demonstrated how to condense sentences by transforming static intransitive verbs into active more descriptive verbs. We further worked on how to smoothly embed quotes into a sentence, and where to reorder sentences within the paragraph.