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Histograms are good, density plots are also good. Violin and bean plots too. Recently I had someone ask for a plot where you could see each individual point along a continuum, give the points specific colours based on a second variable (similar to the figure), which deviates somewhat from the typical density type plots. Apparently, they’re called beeplots or beeswarms. And there’s a way to make them in R (of course, there’s probably more than one… ggplot2??).
Here’s one way (slightly modified from the packages help files)…
library(beeswarm) # assuming you've installed it ;)
data(breast)
beeswarm(time_survival ~ ER, data = breast,
pch = 16, pwcol = 1 + as.numeric(event_survival),
xlab = "", ylab = "Follow-up time (months)", horizontal = TRUE,
labels = c("ER neg", "ER pos"), method = "c")
legend("topright", legend = c("Yes", "No"),
title = "Censored", pch = 16, col = 1:2)
Horizontal is optional of course…
Feel free to comment if you know of other approaches.
Hope that helps someone 
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