When you are fully immersed in the Scour Case Study exam, it is easy to get carried away writing and not really think about how easy it is for the marker to read your script. 

Working through your Mock Exams is a great opportunity to develop good writing habits. 

Here are our two top tips;

Top tip #1 - Don't use more than the width of the page as you see it on the screen

No paper means the freedom to create appendices as wide as you want, right? Wrong! 

You must be able to view all columns of your appendices without having to use the horizontal scroll bar. You will need to widen column A so that you can clearly label your numbers, so this means that you need to shrink or delete columns J and K. There are 2 reasons for this. 

1. The first is that when you come to write up your report, you will merge the cells for text format. If your columns are too wide for the page you will constantly be scrolling side to side to read what you have written. You are making things difficult for yourself - keep everything at page width.
2. The second is if you have to scroll sideways to read your paragraph, so does the marker. Imagine how frustrating this will become over 50 scripts and they may miss something. Don’t take this risk, and keep the marker happy by making your easy to mark script.

Top tip #2 - Don't delete rows

The ICAEW software is not as clever as Excel. If you delete a row from the middle of your appendix, any formulae that relate to that cell will no longer work - worse still, it will present an answer but will refer to the wrong source data. 

You might notice, you might not. Markers can't see your formula, so they will simply mark the number as incorrect

When you delete, you should delete the contents of the cell and leave a blank row, rather than risk corrupting your other formulae.

The Training-by-Eos Scour Mock Exam 2 will be released on Friday, giving you the perfect opportunity to start practising and forming good exam technique habits.