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The issue of essay margins is related to the typing, paragraph spacing and other formatting characteristics of the essay. Once again, margin spacing is put in place in order to ease reading on the part of the evaluator and also to allow for the random insertion of comments or corrections.

As for marigns, then the norm is 1-inch on all sides of the A4 page. However, there are some guides which advise having 1.5 on the left side where comments can be placed. Doing so may also allow for binding of the essay, or anything related to that, which would take up space down the left side of the page.

If margins were at the discretion of the author, then the circumstances of the situation would determine the margins used.  From one angle, it could be said that many students (i.e. authors) are hard-pressed for money.  It follows from this that if an author would spend half the money to print an essay, then they might as well do so.  Making the document single-spaced and reducing the margins would be favourable to the author in such a scenario.

However, on the other hand, some authors might not have adequate content for their essay.  Perhaps the evidences in the body of the essay were not sufficient, or maybe there was not enough material accessible to the author.  There is also the situation where an author may have been too lax and acquainted themselves well enough with the topic of their essay, and in so doing the author ends up short on content.  In this case the author might readily double-space their essay and fiddle with the margins to give the illsuion of fitting the evaluators specifications.

As with other aspects of essay form, margins can be easily recognized as deviating from requirements and this often leads to deduction of marks or at least causing a bad impression. Nevertheless, just as the evaluator can form an impression from the content of the essay, concievably inconspicuous aspects of the form can do just the same.