Don't torture your examiners
It's worth taking a moment to imagine the conditions under which your examiners are likely to read your thesis. If my experience is anything to go by, it won't be in their office. Recently, most of my assessment reading has happened at home or in my car at skateboarding carparks (my son's a skater). These comments are from one examiner who clearly felt tortured by the presentation. The subject matter is poorly presented figures and tables.
Figures and Tables form an integral part of many theses. The key point to remember is that they are not ornaments, added to the body of text to decorate the thesis or make it look more scholarly. Figures and Tables must form stand-alone comprehensible objects; their role is like that of a paragraph: they capture a single idea and that idea must be fully explained within the figure or table or its caption. In addition, the purpose and ideas captured by a figure or table must be fully explained in the text or body of the document, with reference to the figure or table in question. In other words, you can't assume that somehow, by reading the text and gazing at the figure the examiner will somehow get it. Here's one examiner who found this a source of contention:
"A major issue that I have with the thesis is the poor quality of the Figures and Tables which in many cases are too small, of poor print quality or both. This is a major problem with the thesis as they are necessary to explain many concepts. At the present time they make the thesis near impossible to follow in places. For several figures and appendices I needed a magnifying glass to see the figure/table detail. As presented, the majority of the figures and tables act as a deterrent/distraction to understanding the body of the thesis.
Many times I gave up trying to relate the information in the figure to what is being discussed in the text because it was too small/difficult to understand or was lacking sufficient detail in the caption. The text is also confusing/ambiguous in many places. These issues have to be addressed before the thesis is able to be passed.
Coupled with this there are many ambiguities combined with lack of necessary detail in the text itself. These ambiguities and lack of detail combined with the impossible to read figures/tables leave the reader with many questions. In many places the thesis looked like it was a final draft."