Week 3

Our class discussions and reading assignments this week have dealt with images and text and their relationship with each other, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. For example, there are many ways to describe an airplane. One could write a description of an airplane, a history of airplanes, a description of how a jet functions, or any number of things that give information about planes. One could also show how airplanes fly using an image or diagram. The point is that both written words and images can be effective ways to represent an idea.
Sometimes words are more effective in communicating an idea than images. For example, it would be difficult to describe ideas like those in the Declaration of Independence using images alone. Imagine the confusion that the King of England would have experienced had the Founding Fathers sent a picture book to say that they wanted to emancipate themselves from the British Empire. Clearly this is a case in which words are far more effective than any image or number of images can be.
On the other hand, sometimes an image is far more descriptive than words in communication an idea. The old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” is often the case. For example, graphs are common ways that people use images to understand something more quickly and effectively. A line graph showing a company’s earnings is much easier to understand than a written or oral expression of the figures would be. This stems from the fact that humans are visual thinkers. The proportions of the graphs allow us to simultaneously process and compare a lot of information at once.
We must keep in mind, though, that an image can have any number of meanings depending on things like point of view. For example the period is used in the English number system to represent a decimal point, and the comma is used to separate groups of three digits like hundreds, thousands, millions, and so on. However, in many other countries the roles of these two images are reversed. Another example would be that of the Sistine Chapel. Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting can mean many different things to many different people.
In my opinion, words and images aren’t as different from one another as they may seem. Are written letters not simply a type of picture/image? The important thing to realize is that words and images are simply tools that we can use to effectively express our ideas. We must understand that each has its advantages and disadvantages, and instead of trying to use one or the other exclusively we should instead seek a middle ground where we can use a combination of both to effectively express our ideas.