In fourth grade, Natalie sat down with her big box of color pencils and noticed that she used some pencils more often than others. She lined them up–shortest to longest–and then created this graph to show usage. During seventh grade, Natalie and I began taking a careful look at graphs in the New York Times, which frequently uses well-conceptualized, visually interesting graphs to impart information. Our appreciation for information analysis (and semantics in the following example) deepened with the interesting illustration below of the ways in which one can get very different answers to a polling survey based on the phrasing of the question. Thus, ever since we sat next to…