From sight to mind

How diagramming helps story telling

Photo by GoodNotes 5 on Unsplash

Introduction

We often tend to forget that humans are visual animals. Our brains have evolved to become good in visual pattern recognition. Hence the importance of leveraging visual tools in your storytelling.

It is so much easier to tell a story with visuals than to have a wall of text. As the saying goes: A picture is worth a thousand words

Have a look at the following:

There are various dishes one can create just by combining flour, eggs and milk. When you only combine flour and eggs then you obtain pasta. When you combine flour and milk then you obtain batter. When yon combine milk and eggs then yon get an omelet. But if you combine all three of these ingredients then you obtain pancakes.

This block of text is explaining the relationships between the three ingredients in 59 words.

Instead, let’s have a look at a visual representation of the exact same information.

Here, we have the exact same information. However it is now significantly easier for us to understand what’s going on. Not because there…