Prompt: News stories on TV and in newspapers are very often accompanied by pictures. Some people say that these pictures are more effective than words. Ċ What is your opinion about this?

News agencies utilise diagrams and photographs quite regularly for narrating the story. While these images help to understand the reports better, some stories only require elaborate descriptions for avoiding any sort of confusion. This essay will discuss why incorporating images in reports are effective in most of the cases, but why it is better to avoid in some of the exceptional scenarios. Ċ Pictorial representation of an event or a description is easy to grasp. Because of this, people, irrespective of age, and language barrier, could understand the core content in the message. Moreover, this practice has not just helped the viewers and the readers but also the news organisations to attract more followers who are only interested in knowing the high level information. To exemplify, number of units of the Times of India newspapers sold per day have been increased by 10 times since 2005, after they decided to include at least one image in each of the articles. Admittedly, relying heavily on pictures for explaining the news has proven to be very efficient in recent years. Ċ However, not always, adding photos would create a sensible report. Some information needs to be explained in a detailed manner without adding any pics in order to avoid confusions. For example, events such as, bilateral meeting between 2 foreign ministers to discuss about military and financial strategy, or a CEO of the company addressing their employees, should be explained clearly to the viewers by giving enough details in words. A simple picture in cases such as this would not be sufficient to make end users understand. Instead, people might get confused with the similar kind of events which was held prior to the image depicted in the report. Obviously, an image in a report should not induce uncertainty. Ċ To conclude, pictures are helpful to interpret most of the information. But, in my opinion, sometimes, these causes doubt in the users' mind. Thus, it is very essential that pictorial representations are added only if it enhances people's understandability and clarity on the topic.