Question

explain how visual tools help to convey information.

Answer 1

There are several ways that visual tools help convey information. The first way, is in conveying information that is not easily put into words. For example, if you were trying to explain to someone how the price of a stock has risen and fallen in a cyclical nature, it would take all day to cite stock prices and dates of those stock prices and in the end, even if you did this, it is unlikely that your audience would understand how these prices have been cyclical. However, if you put up a graph of the stock prices of the last 5 years, your audience would see in a second that the stock prices create a wave that is cyclical in nature. So this visual aid says more in a short time than you could ever say verbally.

Second, humans are visual creatures. Often it is easier for us to see something that to hear or read about it. A common example of this is found in instruction manuals. Take a VCR manual. Rather than tell you where all the buttons are, they put a diagram of the VCR and pointers to all the buttons. Assembly instructions are another good example. When you get a new bike that you have to assemble, more often than not the assembly instructions are diagrams or pictures of how things go together.

Third. Visual tools are used to capture the attention of the audience. Imagine you were giving a speech on homelessness. Imagine you stand up there and point out all the bad aspects of it. Imagine you cite stats about how many people are homeless. How much of your audience do you thing you would affect. Chances are quite a few with this subject matter. However, now imagine giving the same speech, but this time when you are talking about all the bad aspects, you have on the screen behind you a slide show showing people cold and hudled together in tents, a child drinking from a mud puddle, people washing their clothes or bathing in a stream. When you started talking about the stats on how many people are homeless you had pictures of hundreds of tents in a tent city under a bridge. Now how many in your audience do you think you would affect? Probably almost all of them.

In a nutshell, visual tools make conveying information easier and more powerful than speaking or writing about the information, and sometimes it is not just helpful, but is required. For example, a construction company will not even break ground before they have a set of blueprints in their hands. If you get in a cae accident the DMV and police require that you diagram the accident as well as describe it. Chalkboards (I guess it's whiteboards now) are in the classrooms worldwide for a reason. Because visual tools work.