<p>They just want to make sure your essay has no format: no typeface, no italics, no bold. Perhaps if you use a strange font, for example, it might appear as a bunch of squares to them...who knows.</p>
<p>Yeah what Kyo said is right. As long as you don't have any formatting like that (or quotation marks) you should be fine. But what they want you to do is paste your essay into a program like Notepad and save it as a .txt file. This automatically gets rid of all formatting that the online form can't deal with. Hope that helps!</p>