 <p>A <code>ggplot2</code> solution:</p> <p>I'm going to use the US population dataset in R:</p> <pre><code>population &lt;- data.frame(Year=seq(1790, 1970, length.out=length(uspop)), Population=uspop, Error=rnorm(length(uspop), 5)) library(ggplot2) ggplot(population, aes(x=Year, y=Population, ymin=Population-Error, ymax=Population+Error))+ geom_line(colour="red", size=1.2)+ geom_point(pch=2)+ geom_errorbar(width=0.9) </code></pre> <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/LXFIg.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>