Communication is more effective when verbal and visual are combined harmoniously. I believe no one would refute this statement. However, there is a lot of support that helps me state this with conviction.
For example, a study from the Wharton School of Business has demonstrated that presenters that combined verbal and visual language into their presentations were considered 67% more persuasive than presenters that used purely verbal presentations. Additionally, they found that the combination of verbal and visual elements lead the audience to judge the presenter as more credible, making a better impression and more concise, ultimately a more interesting presentation.
The importance of the visual element in our communication is undeniable. Take a moment and think about a child. The child recognizes what he sees before he can speak. Seeing comes before speaking. We make sense of our world by building a mental representation – image – of things. How easy is it to separate the mental image of an object from the word that describes it? Let’s say, a book. Think about a book for a second. I could bet the image of a book popped up in your mind.
Have you ever wondered why analogies are of such great impact in communication? Take for instance: I feel like a fish out of water. It is used to explain a person doesn’t feel comfortable in their surroundings. But why is it so powerful? Because analogies create images in our minds. When a person says he feels like a fish out of water suddenly we have this, more or less creative colourful imagine in our mind of a fish literally out of water. When a person says he doesn’t feel comfortable, the mind might take a while longer to draw up an image.
Another interesting fact about images is related to memory. While words are processed by our short term memory (one can think about the magic number seven, plus or minus 2: the number of verbal elements one is able to retain in our short term memory at a time until it fades or gets transferred into long term memory) images are processed differently and bypass directly into our long term memory. Might this explain why sometimes all we can remember about someone’s presentation are the strange animations chosen?
However aside from visual supports, such as a PowerPoint presentation or props you use to enrich your message, I would like us to think about ourselves as the most sophisticated visual tool. Why? Well, like I stated, in the beginning, it was the careful combination of verbal and visual language into the presentations that made people judge them as more interesting. When someone communicates a verbal message, we hear the words they use but we can also have access to the visual component – body language, posture, movement, gestures, and facial expressions. All of these elements are part of what we can call a visual language.
Have you heard about the famous statistic “93% of daily communication is non-verbal” associated to a study by Albert Mehrabian? This psychologist conducted several experiments to try and understand the importance of verbal and non-verbal components in our communication.
He explained that 7% of any message is conveyed through words, 38% through vocal elements (the way one says the words) and finally 55% is conveyed by our body language and facial expressions. One might question the exact percentages; however, one thing is true – when we communicate a message the words are what people hear (7+38 so about 45%). Our body language, facial expressions, gestures, movements, etc. are what people see (55%). Therefore we have at our direct disposal the most sophisticated visual tool. What we need to perfect is our ability to deliver clear messages that create images in people’s mind. As Aristotle once said: “The mind never thinks without images”.
Improve the way you combine the verbal and visual, learning how to use the tools you have as a communicator to the fullest potential.
