Article “We Love Them, We Hate Them, We Take Them” by Abigail Zuger and the video “ The Importance of Medication Adherence for Your Health” discusses a crucial component contributing to and ensuring the maintenance of health of a patient. The aforementioned literatures talks about the importance of pills for the patient. Doctors understand the necessity of continuing with medication and suggest their patients to continue with their pill regime and not to terminate it, unless the prescription is complete however, patients are unable to understand this. The article focuses on the emotions experienced by doctors when their pills are rejected by patients or when they see their patients moving to worst after leaving the prescribed pills. The video follows an educational approach and suggest people in general to stick to their medication regime and not to terminate it in between. It also mentions the possible negative consequences of leaving the prescribed medication regime in between. As both the article and video elucidates the importance of medication pills, this paper uses the article and video to compare and contrast the communication strategies in textual and visual media.
The video starts with a gentleman who is board member of NIHU and this communicates to the viewer that this video contains relevant information and the presenter, due to his appearance and designation is a source of credible information; contrastingly the article opens up with interesting description of pills as the member in discussion. The starting line which describes eight people in discussion makes the reader imagine a group of people however, the reader gets the shock in reading intriguing thought process that only two are human and rest are pills. The first paragraph of article establishes the importance of pills in a very creative manner. This encourages reader to continue further and become spectator to a scenario which is very near to reality. The discussion over pills with doctor is one common dialogue which most of us have had in our lives at some point of time. This makes reader to relate with the text; another persuasive communication strategy followed in article. Contrastingly, video preserves its formal educational style and after establishing the credibility with the viewer, moves further and displays relevant images to the narration by the spokesperson in video. The image of ambulance marks the highpoint of video which sends the signal to the viewer that adhering to medication regime is crucial or else the negative consequences could be drastic. Video, by means of images conveys the message to its viewers whereas the article provides several interesting facts and insights to the reader to retain their attention such as in the article, the author describes the emotions and feelings attached with the pills prescribed and the emotion of feeling bad due to deteriorating health of patient which becomes a new aspect for those readers who have always the role of patients in their lives. By means of comparison and contrast, visual mode of communication appears to be an effective method as it has the capability to reach masses and is easy to understand, interpret and provokes action (Lehman & Dufrene, 2010). People, when showed images of mis-happenings and negative consequences tend to follow right path and visual communication deploys this approach effectively.
Comparison of the visual and textual media of communication of the article and video has led to the conclusion that textual communication is an excellent manner of communication as it provides significant insights and facts and intrigues reader’s thought, compelling the reader to introspect and opinionate about the information shared whereas visual communication is effective if the information is a public message intended to educate people on the adoption of best approach or to avoid possible negative outcomes of an approach. Thus, the effectiveness of the mode of communication invariably depends on the subject of communication. In this paper, the theme discussed was the importance of pills for the health of patient and hence, this message is intended to be understood by mass of people, which makes visual communication an effective approach in comparison to textual communication.
Bibliography
C.l M. Lehman & D. D. Dufrene. (2010). Business Communication. Cengage Learning.
Underwriters, N. A. (n.d.). The Importance of Medication Adherence for Your Health. Retrieved November 11, 2011, from NAHU Education Foundation: http://www.nahuef.org/wellness_works/index.cfm#medicine
Zuger, A. (2009). We Love Them. We Hate Them. We Take Them. In J. M. Metz, The Composition of Everyday Life: A Guide to Writing (pp. 534-535). Cengage Learning.
