Fresh evidence for the importance of images in our communications. Check out this post on the Creating Passionate Users blog:

A pile of evidence supports that people learn more deeply from words with pictures than from words alone (Mayer, 1989b, Mayer and Gallini, 1990; Mayer, Bove, and others, 1996.), and overall, several studies combined have shown a median percentage gain of 89% effectiveness.

Wow. That’s a lot. So how do working nature protection and pollution control experts go about producing more visual work? Here are two suggestions:

• Use PowerPoint instead of Microsoft Word. It’s much easier to work with images in PowerPoint. The 2007 PowerPoint even has some pretty good/easy photo editing options. You can save your presentation as a PDF before you send it to somebody.
• Learn to use SnagIt. SnagIt is a program that you can use to grab pictures from your screen and crop and edit them. I use this inexpensive little program constantly and recommend it wholeheartedly.