Personally I prefer histograms (assuming you have all the data, not just mean and std dev). For example, here's a histogram of ages of passengers of the Titani

Personally I prefer histograms (assuming you have all the data, not just mean and std dev). For example, here's a histogram of ages of passengers of the Titanic: https://www.statwing.com/demos/titanic#workspaces/21 https://www.statwing.com/demos/titanic#workspaces/21 Or rents in the bay area: https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/034b4af16d50a0ad35f1aa39b4002680734e219d#workspaces/6909 https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/034b4af16d50a0ad35f1a... Gives a real nice feel for the data. These histograms are lacking in that they don't actually have the mean line or std devs on the plot itself; my general point is that if the goal is to get across a distribution, a histogram is the best way to do it, perhaps aided by markers for mean, median, std dev, etc., as the case merits. Disclosure: I work at Statwing.