Style your plot!

There are a lot of options on how to change the appearance of your plot. See the help of par() to get an overview of some of the options. With par, you an change parameters of plot appearence.

For example, you can adjust the area around your plot (=margin, mar) and the area beyond that (=outer margin area, oma)

This is displayed expertly here https://r-graph-gallery.com/74-margin-and-oma-cheatsheet.html

Generally, to change the size you have to give a vector of lines you want to have as spacer around first, the bottom, left, top and right to the plot. A mar=c(4,5,1,0) would mean you have 4 lines space from the axis to the end of the margin, 5 to the left, 1 to the top, 0 to the right

plot(1:10)
?par

par(mar=c(2,8,0,0))
plot(1:100)

With las you can change the orientation of your labeling.

If you want to restyle your axis - let’s say you want to displac log transformed values, but want to display original values for better readability, you can remove the original axes by setting axes=F and add new ones, with changed labels:

plot(1:100)
par(las=1)

plot(log(1:100), axes=F, ylab="")
axis(1)
val.orig <- c(1,10,100)
val.log <- log(val.orig)
axis(2, at= val.log, labels=val.orig)
axis(4, at= val.log, labels=round(val.log,2))