Two very different clouds can share the same correlation. One may be tight with a rebel; the other, loose but clean. Numbers rhyme; pictures speak. That’s why Anscombe’s lesson endures: always sketch the data. Write one sentence for each plot: direction, form, strength, outliers… and only then compute r. If your sentence and your statistic disagree, the sentence wins. The goal isn’t a coefficient; it’s a correct story.
