The font used for this text is Tahoma. It's a sans-serif font, meaning that there are no short lines at any of the tips of the letters.

Another example of a sans-serif font is Arial, which I like to use for e-mails because it's very easy to read. Sans-serif fonts are especially useful for signs and other places where legibility is critical.

I use a serif font such as Garamond for most of my word documents. Serif fonts are better for longer texts such as essays. But if we're talking about essays, then usually there's a page requirement and you don't want to pick Garamond because it's such a small font.

Courier New is notorious for being a large font, but other fonts such as Bookman Old Style can also make your essay longer without being as obvious.