What is a familiar and convenient way of keeping score of a set of obervations when constructing a frequency distribution table?

Answer 1

Tally


You can extend the idea of tally further to what Statisticians refer to as a Stem & Leaf Plot, which is a simple type of histogram. With a Stem & Leaf plot your tallies are placed in 'bins' according to their value, allowing you to observe the distribution of your data.

Let's say you have a data set: 0, 7, 10, 13, 18, 19, 21, 29, 55, 57, 59, 59, 60

The Stem & Leaf Plot would look like this:

0|07
1|0389
2|19
3|
4|
5|5799
6|0

i.e. '0' becomes '00' and '7' becomes '07' for the purposes of this Stem & Leaf Plot which needs two digits to illustrate its shape in this way.