ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the representation of data sets in charts or graphs. People who dislike statistics nevertheless tend to like drawing graphs. However they are also prone to putting far too many of them into a report to make it look more interesting. It’s worth stopping to think, just what is a graph or chart for? It is not to make your report look more scientific or credible. Basically it transmits useful information to your reader. It should be a way of summing up at a glance the main features of your data or some important aspect of them. It is very easy to mislead with unfairly displayed bar charts. Newspapers do it very frequently. Line charts can also be drawn where the horizontal scale is not continuous. The horizontal axis might carry the mean scores obtained in several trials of an experiment.
