I am plotting a graph with a categorical variable on the x axis and a numerical variable on the y axis.
For the x axis, given that there are many data points, the de
Use theme():
d <- data.frame(x=gl(10, 1, 10, labels=paste("long text label ", letters[1:10])), y=rnorm(10))
ggplot(d, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_point() +
theme(text = element_text(size=20),
axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, hjust=1))
#vjust adjust the vertical justification of the labels, which is often useful

There's lots of good information about how to format your ggplots here. You can see a full list of parameters you can modify (basically, all of them) using ?theme.