title: In R base plot, move axis label closer to axis
body: <p>I have eliminated labels on the y axis because only the relative amount is really important.</p>
  
  <pre><code>w &lt;- c(34170,24911,20323,14290,9605,7803,7113,6031,5140,4469)
  plot(1:length(w), w, type="b", xlab="Number of clusters",
       ylab="Within-cluster variance",
       main="K=5 eliminates most of the within-cluster variance",
       cex.main=1.5,
       cex.lab=1.2,
       font.main=20,
       yaxt='n',lab=c(length(w),5,7), # no ticks on y axis, all ticks on x
       family="Calibri Light")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/c2ako.png" alt="cluster plot"></p>
  
  <p>However, suppressing those tick labels leaves a lot of white space between the y axis label ("Within-cluster variance") and the y axis.  Is there a way to nudge it back over?  If I somehow set the (invisible) tick labels to go <em>inside</em> the axis, would the axis label settles along the axis?</p>