Description: This abstract describes a presentation that gives examples of more successful and less successful communications from the author’s research experience in actuarial risk management.

Description: Actuaries, like other business professionals, communicate quantitative ideas graphically. Because the process of reading, or decoding, graphs is more complex than reading text, graphs are vulnerable to many sources of abuse. This is the abstract of a paper that will help creators design more effective graphs and will help viewers recognize misleading graphs. The paper summarizes guidelines for designing graphs that show important numerical information and gives examples of commonly encountered graphs that mislead and hide information. The complete paper appears in the April 1998 issue of the North American Actuarial Journal. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1998 Vol. 1.