Draw Me a Picture

I love words. Love to read them -- big juicy novels, pithy little poems. Love to play with them -- scrabble, puns. I like to talk, and I even love to write (sometimes). I've made my living wordsmithing, one way and another, and yet I remain awed and delighted by the human potential to manipulate an alphabetical symbol system to make meaning, share ideas, and create beauty. Most of all, I love a good story -- the shining example, the telling anecdote, the personal narrative that shows why the message is important.

But when it comes to numbers, I'm suspicious. Recalling the joke about "lies, damned lies, and statistics," I've seen numbers masquerading as absolutes and disguised as irrefutable evidence when I was pretty sure they could not be trusted to tell the truth. Columns of numbers marching confidently across the pages of a report seem design to intimidate rather than inform. I want to pull them out of their ranks and question each number about its origins and authenticity. I acquired this prejudice against quantitative research during an undergraduate experience as a research assistant administering forced-choice questionnaires to hapless subjects of a medical compliance study. (We chose the words; they only got to choose a box to check.)

So it's no wonder I love the new "dashboard" graphics that package numeric reports into colorful tables, pie charts, and trend lines. Intellectually, I realize those same suspicious numbers are what's generating the graphics, but somehow the message is less intimidating than rows and columns of figures are to me. (Is this a "girl thing"?) Something about numbers seems pushy, presenting themselves as factual evidence even when the context is ambiguous. A graphic representation, on the other hand, well it's just a picture. It seems to invite interpretation in a more subtle way, even as it further masks the qualitative nature of its content.

Does this say anything about the quality of information? Probably not, but it does remind us that the audience for any message brings its own preferences and prejudices to the table. Whether you're writing a report or reporting the numbers, pictures help!