Lily Zhao (Yale) gave Megan Bedell (Flatiron) and I a tour of the figures in our nascent paper on spectrograph calibration. For each figure we asked: Does this figure tell a part of our story? And: Is that point clear in both the figure and the caption? My philosophy is that most of your readers are not going to curl up with a hot cocoa on the sofa and luxuriously read your paper; most of your readers are going to skim your paper on their phones, while waiting in line to pick up a coffee. So you want the paper to be comprehensible on a skim. That skim probably involves settling on figures and captions, so these should tell the whole story of the paper, or as best they can. Of course I don't always follow my own advice here, but I should.
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