Normally a child speaks his first word when he is about one year old. It is interesting to find that parents like showing their little children flash cards to help them learn words. I saw a baby playing an ipad flash cards in his baby cart (though it may seem a little extreme, pictures help little children to memorize words).
Many youngsters nowadays like comic books more than novels. Newspapers and magazines – the latter in particular – use pictures for illustration. All these show the importance of pictures as visual aid. Pictures allows readers to use their own imagination.
Other than a mere visual aid, pictures have also the important duty of convincing us of even the most unbelievable. There is a familiar old saying – ‘seeing is believing’. You can often hear people say they won’t believe something unless they can see it ‘with their own eyes’. A science book will tell you water boils even at 0oC, provided that the pressure is low, but such unbelievable and intuitively challenging phenomenon is only believable when you have seen it happen, and pictures provide a nice medium for that even if you don’t have the time or equipment to perform such an experiment. In other words, pictures convince readers to believe what the author wants them to believe.
