Editing Guide to technical writing (section)

==Figure captions==
You may have been previously taught to keep figure captions short and succinct.  This is usually the case for essays, magazine articles, newspapers etc.  However, for scientific journals and your thesis this is absolutely wrong.

Your figure caption should begin with a short descriptive sentence to identify the figure. Then the caption should have a full description of the figure to explain the figure to the reader. A good way to write the full description is to imagine you have never seen the figure before. Then ask yourself what you need to know to the grasp what is going on in the figure. If the figure is a graph or a representation of a result, you need to state if it is experiment, theory, or simulation.  You also need to state any key parameters and conditions.

Your thesis LaTeX file is set up to automatically compile a list of figures at the beginning of the thesis. This creates a problem, as you obviously don't want a huge caption description to appear in this list. So the fix for this is to use this command for all your figure captions in your thesis:   \caption[Short caption text]{Full caption text}.    Only the short description in the square brackets will then appear in the List of Figures.   The complete caption will appear under each figure.