Essay is basically the act of ‘trying out… or an act of attempting to accomplish something. It is also an analytic or interpretive literary composition. Essays, therefore, essentially reveal the personality of the writer besides giving his/her viewpoints on a specific subject matter. Essays help us express ourselves, our thoughts, our ideas and our perceptions about things we are associated with or about things we are impacted with or wish to have an impact on. Essays not only provide the required space and tool, they also let us leisurely saunter along. Tweeting or emailing cannot achieve this. This answers why we should write essays. We should write because we cannot always speak out minds coherently. There is no fixed length of an essay. It could be written in just about 100 words or even in several thousand words. Generally speaking, essays are not very long. But they need not be too small either. On an average, an essay in one thousand words should be adequate. A range of 1,000 to 1,500 is generally accepted as ideal for competitive exams and that is the length of the majority of the essays in this book.
