Speaking Stata: Axis practice, or what goes where on a graph

Conventions about what information goes on each axis of a two-way plot are precisely that, conventions. This column discusses—historically, syntactically, and by example-the idea that flouting convention in various ways can lead to small but useful improvements in graph display. Putting y-axis information on the right or on the top, or putting x-axis information on the top, often is useful. The most substantial examples are for multiple quantile plots, for which the new command multqplot is offered, and table-like graphs, which are made even more table-like by mimicking column headers.