Creating effective graphs

the long version

This volume of New Directions for Evaluation is an attempt to share ideas and improve the hit-or-miss nature of graphical production. The graphs in this volume are solutions to problems that arise when communicating evaluation findings. The problems are common and recurring. Sometimes they involve communicating a known finding that could be contained in a table but would be much more difficult to extract from the table. Sometimes they expose biases in the narrative reporting of the data. Sometimes they reveal implications that would have gone unnoticed and allow new findings to emerge. The graphs can be used for discovery or for presentation; they are sometimes designed for evaluators and other times for evaluation audiences.