For more reading on the topic, I'd recommend "How to Lie with Statistics"[0]. It's a short read (144 pages), with mainly tongue-in-cheek instructions on how to

For more reading on the topic, I'd recommend "How to Lie with Statistics"[0]. It's a short read (144 pages), with mainly tongue-in-cheek instructions on how to mislead. Most of the usual tricks ('drop the axes', percentage-points, etc) are there, but there are many other, less obvious tricks. One of the cooler arguments in the book is that it's easy to lean on someone's implicit assumption of volume to modify their understanding. If you inflate a 15% increase in house spending to look larger than it is, drawing pictures of houses that are 15% wider will make people intuit a 50%[1] increase, despite reading 15%. The author suggests that even if you're incredibly clear with the text surrounding the charts, people still use the charts to understand the scales of change. [0] http://amzn.to/1RmCVmL http://amzn.to/1RmCVmL (disclaimer: affiliate link) [1] 1.15^3 ~= 1.5