Why visual tools improve your thinking: Bertrand Russell

For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out quite why visual tools are so powerful. I know so from experience but was interested in the underlying reasons.

This is the first in a series of four answers. To me, the series builds up the arguments in sequence.
The first comes from a giant of modern philosophy, Bertrand Russell.

Diagrams, according to Russell, are easier to understand than text. They show the viewer complex relationships clearly, whereas even simple relationships are made complex when expressed in sentences.

“Languages…are sequential in nature, and so must have a compensatingly complex syntax in order to express certain relationships — whereas diagrams, being two dimensional, are able to display relationships without the intervention of complex syntax.”

References: Vagueness (1923) in Slater J. G. (ed) Essays on Language, Mind and Matter: The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 9, 145–154, Unwin (1988)