The Georgia Negro: A Social Study - Bar graph shows the number of African American students enrolled in various educational programs, with the largest number enrolled in industrial programs [LCCN2013650436]
The pattern
This still is filed under Data as proof.
Define
A chart, map, or count that is the argument, not an illustration next to the argument.
Mechanism
Sighted evidence. The reader is asked to believe their eyes: a bar, a share, a spread on a map.
Verdict
The claim is comparative or quantitative and the figure can be read without a caption doing the sell.
Why it works
The chart refuses the scale break. The honest move would have been to compress the axis so all six bars fit, which is exactly what would have destroyed the point; instead the unit stays fixed and the outlier is allowed to run off the page and fold back on itself. Because the reader's eye has to physically travel the bar three times across the sheet, the ratio is experienced as distance rather than read as a number. The empty upper two-thirds is doing work too - the five starved categories look starved because of how much white space surrounds their stubs.
Steal this when
Use this when one value in a set dwarfs the others and the disproportion IS the argument, not a nuisance to be normalised away. It is the right structure whenever rescaling the axis would let your audience off the hook.