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Action Captions - A Picture Says 1,000 Words But Who Gets to Choose Them?
" Some people receive printed information best, some prefer hearing the information and still others are visual oriented and want to see the information.
In an article of any kind where pictures, or graphics, are interspersed with text you have to get your message across to both textual and visual oriented readers.
In a competitive situation you may have to satisfy all three if orals are part of the effort.
Does this mean that only those with a visual orientation will review your graphics? Of course it doesn't, but what graphic have you seen that doesn't include a caption? Most of the time you can't simply look at a piece of art and immediately grasp its meaning or intended message.
One hundred percent of the time you will never know what the person that created it intended it to say.
Think of the standard organization chart that you'll find in most every proposal.
Most often it simply has a caption that says "The XYZ Project Organization.
" Other than to break up dense text, how has this helped your proposal? No mater how visually appealing you make it, it's still just a bunch of boxes connected with lines that claims to be the XYZ Project Organization.
What 1,000 does it say? How does it help your overall score? It has become the visual equivalent to fly over country or vanilla; you know it's there but so what? Like the rest of your proposal a graphic should answer the what's in it for me question and this is accomplished using an action caption.
The action caption becomes your thousand words.
You tell the viewer what they are seeing and how it supports your claims, what benefit you provide, or why you're unique.
As a result the ho hum XYZ Project Organization might become; The XYZ Project Organization - ABC's XYZ project organization eliminates redundancy and reduces overall development cost by watching it's Ps and Qs.
If it doesn't add to your probability of winning don't include it.
That goes for both text and graphics.
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