ABSTRACT
Children begin drawing graphs in infant school and will continue to do so at least until they leave formal education. The teaching of graphing skills is usually confined to the mathematics areas of the curriculum, with the assumption that the conventions learned there can then be applied in many contexts, including the humanities and science. This particular convention for communicating information is ubiquitous both in school and beyond. It has become embedded in popular culture; advertisers, politicians and the popular media frequently use graphs to convey information or opinion. They are all well aware that the graph offers a powerful method of expressing trends and patterns in the relationship between two or more varying factors, with a high degree of visual impact. Used well, graphs help the reader to understand these relationships better; used badly they can confuse and mislead (accidentally or otherwise!).
