A thousand words are worth a picture?

A disturbing note on the demise of diagramming

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com M on Unsplash

Over several years of teaching chart-intensive courses such as computer architecture and operating systems, I have noticed that many students are deeply uncomfortable with diagrams. Specifically:

• They do not LIKE diagrams, often preferring a sea of text.
• They do not know how to read diagrams.
• They are uncomfortable drawing diagrams.
• They do not understand, or do not care about, the importance of visual details: solid versus dashed lines, the direction of arrows, the difference between ovals, rectangles, and rectangles with rounded corners.

I have always considered diagrams (UML diagrams, ERDs, structure charts, Gantt charts, flowcharts, architecture diagrams, and many others) essential to engineering, including software engineering and software development. I still believe that one cannot write a program substantially more complex than print(“Hello world!”) without some form of proper visual or structural modeling support. (And please, do not “vibecode” me.)

Where has this knowledge of diagramming been lost — or is it no longer taught in the first place?

My suspicion is that part of the problem lies in the decline of manual geometric and spatial skills. These used to be taught throughout elementary school and, at least to some extent, reinforced in middle and high school. They introduced and strengthened the concepts of geometric objects: lines, triangles, circles, ovals, rectangles, and their properties, such as straightness, size, and proportion, and their spatial relationships, such as parallelism, adjacency, containment, and connection.

In geometry class, we used to learn how to organize visual information on a limited-sized sheet of paper, place objects on a grid, balance margins, and make connections intelligible. These are not merely “drawing” skills. They are thinking skills.

Mechanical and optical mice may have kept the spatial skillset on life support for a while. Touchpads and touchscreens, I fear, have not helped. We may have reached the point where a thousand words are worth a picture.

Am I needlessly in panic mode? In the age of AI, do we no longer need diagramming? Or do we need it more than ever — precisely because we need better ways to inspect, communicate, and verify complex ideas?

What do you think?