Get to the point II: Figures

Figures

When referring to figures in text,

• Introduce the figure and the main point it is intended to convey early in the paragraph before you begin interpreting results.  
• Refer to figures in order of appearance.
• In the middle of the sentence, name of the figure is capitalized and abbreviated (e.g. Fig. 1).
• At the beginning of a sentence, name of figure is capitalized and unabbreviated (Figure 1).
• Dates/time  should be in format: 8 AM EDT 8 September 2012 or 12 UTC  8 September 2012

For the example used in the previous post, the first two sentences could be accompanied by an introduction to a figure:

• "Figure 1 shows the frequency of hurricane force winds along the Florida coastline."
• "The frequency of hurricane force winds along the Florida coastline is shown in Fig. 1."

You could then proceed with a detailed analysis of the figure in question.

Include all information seen in figure
Include the following information in figure where possible

• Figure title
• Contour labels
• Axis labels
• Parameters
• Dates and times

It is also important that figure captions contain the following information if they are not contained in the figure itself:

• Parameters plotted
• Contour intervals with units
• Source

An example

The example below shows a good caption. Note how the units are clearly indicated on the graph, so there is no need to mention in the caption. Times and dates of data are clear. A legend describes the different parameters plotted, so this is not necessary to put in the captions. If these elements were missing, they would need to be in the captions. Note that analysis is done in the text.