Example

Let’s take a look at what stem and leaf plot looks like and go over how they are constructed. The data used to construct the stem and leaf plot is as follows:

21, 22, 22, 24, 31, 31, 31, 35, 37, 43, 44, 46, 48, 48, 49, 52, 55, 55, 56, 67, 68, 68

Let’s look at this in a little more detail, the first sample point is equal to 21, therefore we enter a 2 under the stem side of the plot and a 1 under the leaves side. Your plot should now look like this.

Multiply the stem by 10 and then add the leaf to the stem to get the original value.

If we add the next data point (22) the plot will then look like this.

We continue this process for all the data points. We end up with the stem and leaf plot we had at the beginning which looks like this:

This is just a simple example of a stem and leaf plot, you can see that not only does this type of plot show the distribution of the data but it also allows us to know precisely what data was recorded.