Abstract

Krzywinski and Cairo beautifully illustrate the widespread view that scientific writing should follow a journalistic ‘storytelling’, wherein the choice of what data to plot, and how, is tailored to the message the authors want to deliver. However, they do not discuss the pitfalls of the approach, which often result in a distorted and unrepresentative display of data—one that does not do justice to experimental complexities and their myriad of interpretations.