Too Many Words

A picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when you're trying to get information or knowledge to go from your head into someone else's. You can talk all day, but that sketch on the back of the napkin can suddenly make it all clear. When you're communicating, you have a thought bubble over your head with a representation of what you're trying to convey, and the listener/receiver has a thought bubble over his head with a representation of what he thinks about what you're saying. The big question is, do they match?

If you use only words, there's a way better chance that the picture over the listener's head won't match. And sometimes even the subtlest difference is a deal-killer. But it's not just accuracy you get from using pictures... you get speed. This picture from our servlets book, for example, did in a two-page spread what would have taken me many pages and several thousand words to explain with the same depth of understanding.

Pictures save time.

And here's a third benefit: the brain likes them, so you have a better chance of getting past the brain's crap filter using pictures than words alone.

For learning, there's a ton of research that supports using visuals. In one set of ten studies, people who learned from graphics and words together produced between 55 percent to 121 percent more correct solutions to transfer problems than people who learned from words alone (Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer).

And I've talked before about how the effectiveness of words goes down as your audience gets younger, and/or has a brain raised in an increasingly visually rich environment. Remember, while those over 45 will generally say that pictures are used simply to support a text (but the text is primary), most twenty-somethings say that they'd be just as happy (or happier) if the text were there only when required to support the pictures. The pictures rule.

If you're like me--a communicator/teacher/blogger who isn't necessarily a writer, make sure you spend more time figuring out how to incorporate visuals. Use a graphics program, or use a digital camera and a whiteboard to just put in drawings like this one (a mind-map we made while talking to book authors about how to choose what should go in a chapter):

Consider this exercise we give our authors: before you write something, ask yourself "What could I do in a visual form (photo, illustration, cartoon, whatever) that would make this point?" and see if you can do it. If you don't know a graphics program, start learning. It's the 21st century, and I believe that skill with visual/graphic tools (you don't have to be a designer!) should be right up there with typing and writing. Just something everyone knows how to do. (Virtually all kids in US schools are getting some training in some form of computer graphics.) Not everyone who writes on a blog is expected to be Hemmingway, and not everyone who creates pictures is expected to be Picasso. Keep thinking back of the napkin sketch. If you're not used to thinking in pictures, it might take a little practice, but before long, you'll wonder how you got along with only words. : )