Band 7.5 Essay Sample | News Stories Are Often Accompanied By Images

The following is an essay submitted by one of our students.

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

Write at least 250 words.

Band 7.5 essay sample

The way news is disseminated to a viewer or a reader has dramatically changed over the last few decades. If in the previous century the major part of the information was a piece of text either printed in a newspaper or read by an announcer on TV, today it tends to be substituted by pictures or video. I agree with the view that the visual channel of receiving information is more effective.

Firstly, we receive most of the information through our eyes. For example, sometimes one good image can be better than tons of words. Scientists claim that a written text must be processed by the brain before it will be stored in our memory as a visual image. If we use pictures, we can skip this translation step and improve the data handling process.

Secondly, the amount of information consumed by an average person has drastically increased. For instance, if before it was just newspapers and radio, today TV, the Internet and social networks have added. Thus picking some piece of data from this enormous pool becomes very difficult. As it shows, the information with less complex structure, such as pictures, have more chances to be stored.

After analyzing how people handle data from the environment and the estimation of modern information flow volume, it is felt the argument for more effectiveness of pictures rather than words has been proved.