[gruseom]

Really? Because it's also a notorious way to distort data. It sounds like you have more experience with this than I do, but I'm puzzled by the contradiction here. When is it a normal, even required scientific technique and when is it the oldest "how to lie with statistics" trick in the book?

[Confusion]

OK, that's an interesting question. I guess it depends on the audience. When your audience is scientifically minded, they will know how to interpret your axes and understand why you made a certain choice. They might criticize you for it, but you know such a choice will be scrutinized, so you won't try to deceive them. When your audience consists of less numerically literate folks, you have to be careful with your axes, as you make something appear more interesting that it actually is. If I take a graph from a scientific presentation and use it in an article for lay people, I'm not trying to trick them, but it may appear as such. I guess it's a fine line between making the interesting bits stand out and making bits stand out to make them seem interesting.