Among the many extraordinary talents of Charles Dickens was his ability to describe people, places, objects, and situations in a way that allows readers to experience the events he narrated. Unfortunately, few of us have the capability or the time to describe and narrate like Dickens. Luckily, we live in the digital age where it is relatively easy to add visual aids to our text.

A noun describes a person, place, or a thing. The mere mention of a noun we know invokes an image in the mind. Upon reading the word CAR, readers would have no difficulty in visualizing a car or understanding what a car is. Most of us will visualize cars of different shapes, models, and colors. Adjectives, which describe nouns, help in narrowing the mental images of readers to something closer to what the writer is visualizing. RED CAR would narrow the color choices. RED SPORTS CAR would narrow the choices further. But now matter how descriptive the writer is, he would not be able to describe exactly what he sees. Which shade of red? Perhaps the car is a bit dusty and rusty. Perhaps the sunset has changed the hue. A picture of the car, however, allows every reader to see exactly what the writer is seeing. It shows details, which weren't even noticed by the writer. It shows details left out by the writer, such as the surroundings of the vehicle. A single image allowed the writer to describe the object better than he could have described with skillful use of adjectives. Clearly a picture is worth a thousand words and a video would perhaps be worth thousands of words.The image, of course, does not provide the artistic qualities of skillfully written paragraphs but most of us are interested in writing business and technical documents, not masterworks of fiction.

Visual communication helps in describing physical objects and explaining ideas and processes. As we have just seen, images are efficient medium for describing physical objects. Ideas and processes are not physical objects but sparks in our heads or flow of events. They can be visualized with diagrams, graphs, charts, screenshots, and other visual illustrations. Unless you enjoy writing lengthy text documents, consider adding visual illustrations in your documents. A wide array of tools are now available to make this a simple task. Mindmaps are used to organize ideas. Flow charts represent flow of events. Building plans illustrate the components and arrangement of the building components. Use case diagrams show how sequence of event in usage of a system. Depending on your industry and profession, if you are involved in a trade or profession, chances are that you there is a set of illustrative techniques which are used. You should become familiar with the visual illustration techniques i.e. learn how to interpret, create, modify, and add there illustrations to your documents. Learn to use the tools which would make creation and modification of these tools simpler. The effort you put into learning visual techniques and tools would pay back by allowing you to write visually appealing, clear, concise, and comprehensible documents while having to write fewer lines of text.