: Should embedded figures/images be placed before or after they are referred to in text? As the title question asks: Should embedded figures/images be placed before or after they are referred to

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This depends in part on the type of writing (technical reference manual? novel with illustrations? etc) and how people will read it (printed book? online?).

If a reader follows a reasonable path1 through the document, there should never be a point where he's looking at something incomprehensible. This applies to text, code samples, diagrams, and screen shots. Therefore, unless the structure of your document itself provides this (e.g. through section titles and a consistent format, like in a catalogue), you should always have some explanatory text before the screen shot to provide context.

However, this principle applies to text too -- you don't want to have a page of text describing stuff that will only make sense after someone sees the image, either. So in my experience the norm is: text that sets the stage, then the image, then details that refer to the screen shot.

This is true with or without figure numbers and captions.

Contrary to this answer, I do not recommend placing an image in the middle of a sentence ("in this figure: (figure) we see..."). I've found that for many readers the image functions as its own "paragraph", and they find the dangling sentence fragments around it distracting. I'll do this in casual writing like on my blog, but I try to avoid it in formal writing like documentation or books.

All of this is for images where some textual explanation is needed. If you're writing a novel and are including maps or illustrations purely as supplementary material, then you can put those wherever you want as the text does not depend on them and they do not depend on the text.

1 At minimum (for non-reference doc), starting at the beginning and reading through. But also consider the case of someone who looks something up in the table of contents and jumps there, and, if applicable, the use of your documentation in online context-sensitive help.

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