[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: Visuals are essential in the world of work. No matter where you work in a health care facility, government agency, retail business, bank, and so on, your employer will expect you to be visually competent. That means you'll have to interpret, use, and create visuals and graphics. Let's take a look at the purpose of visuals in communication. 

Visuals often explain the job you have to do and help you report on how well you did it. Tables, charts, graphs, drawings, diagrams, maps, and photographs are an important functional part of almost every workplace document, including employee handbooks, instructions, proposals, reports, blogs, newsletters, and websites. 

Visuals work in conjunction with your writing to summarize, inform, illustrate, and persuade. The tables, graphs, and charts that you use simplify financial data and other statistical information in a report. And the photos and other graphics you incorporate in them have a major impact on how readers will see and judge your work. 

In our digital culture, whether we're navigating a website, using a media device, collaborating with colleagues, or communicating with clients, visuals play a major role in conveying information. Animation, color, icons, graphs, illustrations, charts, photographs, and infographics all contribute to our understanding and evaluation. Visuals make documents informative, inviting, and easy to read. 

They are vital to the success of reports, proposals, instructions, presentations, websites, blogs, and many other documents. Even your company logo reveals a great deal about your firm's or organization's image and mission. Here are several reasons visuals can improve your work. 

Visuals condense and summarize a large quantity of information or text into a relatively small space. They can record data in far less space than it would take to describe those facts in words alone. Visuals can simplify and communicate concepts. A visual shows ideas while verbal descriptions only tells about them. Visuals help reader more clearly see and understand percentages, trends, comparisons, contrasts, and reduces the chances of a reader misunderstanding a concept. 

Visuals also arouse the reader's immediate interest. They catch the reader's eye quickly by setting important information apart and giving relief from having to wade through a page of monotonous text with only sentences and paragraphs. Visuals also have tremendous sales appeal, persuading readers to buy a product or service or accept your point of view. 

Visuals help readers find information quickly. They highlight, separate, or show relationships in data to emphasize points for readers so that they don't have to hunt through the text to find them. Visuals separate main points from supporting details. 

Visuals help readers remember information longer. Their impact reinforces a message and emphasizes what's most important for readers. Well-chosen and designed visuals can motivate your reader to understand and accept your ideas. Visuals are essential in the world of work. 

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