Visual Literacy in Business

[Name of teacher]

Visual Literacy in Business

Introduction

Human mind has always been more receptive to messages that are presented in a pictorial form (Rutter, et al., 2011). The reason behind this development is that it is easy to transform pictorial cues into a form of story, or sequential messages which are easier to be associated with pre existing memories. Visual messages encompass an important aspect of our daily life; it is all around us (Agrawala, et al., 2011)). Be it while watching fictional or real stories on television, viewing advertisement on a magazine or witnessing them while driving on the road, or graphs and tables found in the books. All of these aspects are considered as a part of the visual communication. A major part of such visual communication is carried out indirectly by using symbolic means which include using signs, symbols or even words. While considering the educational perspective, visual communication is effectively used to convey various forms of comprehensive and difficult information through means of graphs and tables. In this coursework, the importance of graphs and tools regarding the interpretation of such graphs are discussed.

Discussion

Key Terms

Graphs constitute to an important part of our life. Though, this may sound strange, but without them the only thing we would be lost in is heaps of data. Graphs are more visually appealing and add an element of differentiation to an assignment. However, due to the growing use of graphs and problems associated with interpreting the information portrayed in them, it is imperative that information presented on the graphs can be interpreted exactly.

Figure 1

Source: http://s3.vidimg.popscreen.com/original/16/eGVhanUzMTI=_o_how-to-make-stacked-and-double-bar-graphs.jpg

There are some preliminary aspects which should be known about graphs. Every graph includes a scale, title, key and an axis. A scale which displays the numeric figures, tells a student about how the numbers are evenly distributed to represent a particular unit of measure (Willenborg, et al., 2010). A title on the other hand explains the kind of information which will be found in the graph and in usually displayed at the top of the graph, like in the example shown. A key explains any additional information which might be used in the graph, for example in this graph the key explains that the color purple represents Tuesdays, while the color pink represent Wednesdays. Furthermore, every graph has two axis lines. These are found on both the vertical and horizontal sides. The vertical axis usually runs along the line of the graph, whereas the horizontal axis runs along the bottom of the graph.

After understanding all of the above mentioned key terms, it is indeed quite necessary to remember the fact that all these aspects form a combined impact in the end; in order to create a mechanical fluency within the flow of the message.

Common Mistakes in Interpretation

One of the most common mistakes in interpreting the graphs is trying to interpret the graph without actually trying to understand what it is about. The key terms discussed above can radically help a student in ...