Broadly speaking, there are two types of essays formal and informal. In the UPSC Civil Services Examination (CSE), we are concerned with the formal essay. The formal essay is relatively impersonal, the author writes it as an authority and such essays tend to be less emotional. Formal essays can also have factual elements in it, like quoted statistics from a government report etc. It is never in the form of a conversation, never uses first-person references and seldom gets intimate with the audience. In short, a formal essay has a certain degree of seriousness attached to it. Essay writing for CSE For the CSE essay paper, two essays have to be written under 3 hours in the 1000-1200 word limit. Each essay carries 125 marks for a total of 250. The essay paper is divided into two sections - A and B, each carrying a choice of 4 essays each, and the aspirant has to choose only one essay from each section. The instructions in the syllabus are clear in what is being expected from the aspirant. Aspirants are expected to keep their thoughts closely to the subject and arrange their ideas accordingly. It furthur tates that, credit will be given for effective and coherent expression. The underlined keywords are important because after content, these are the exact parameters on which the essay will be evaluated. Beginning Essay Writing Practice makes perfect. For scoring good marks in the essay, one needs practice. But, before we get to the practising part, we should do some basic homework first. We would start by looking at what a well structured essay is, how it can be planned, what elements can be added to make the essay more scoring, and most importantly, how to do it all within the prescribed time limit. Basic structure of an essay The most common method of structuring a essay is breaking it up into paragraphs. In this technique, besides the introduction and the conclusion, there will be body-paragraphs. In these body-paragraphs, the aspirant will have to fit in all his content.