Don Marti

Sun 17 Apr 2005 08:33:52 PM PDT

Body copy and captions

If you're writing an article with figures and captions, don't worry about duplicating the text of the article in the figure caption. People often just skim the captions and a good one will suck people into reading the whole article.

Good caption: "From the surveillance window, click WARN to have the robot shout a final warning in Esperanto. Then click FIRE to fire the lasers."

Weak caption: "The surveillance window has a robot's-eye view, along with a yellow WARN button and a red FIRE button."

Oh, and don't just describe the figure in the caption.