"A picture is worth a thousand words!" - this is true for only some of us!
Even though I teach about learner type and always draw my students' attention that there are three basic big categories people learn stuff: Visual learners (who need charts, drawings, and pictures), auditive learners (who need to listen and hear the sounds of the words), and kinesthetic learners (who need to do things, motor action, and act upon the task to be learned). I am definitely a visual learner, and am aware of the other types of learning since I do use them at times for certain tasks. When taking a learning style test actually I scored almost equal in all three, with two points difference having on top the visual learning style.
Depends on what I am asked to do I use a certain style, and I think this is how most of us learners are.
I did not thought that the difference might be so stringent when we talk about maps.
If you give me a map I can go around the world, I never get lost if I have a map and I know where is North. I am not too good on reading the stars, but I know where the Sun is :-)
I traveled the West coast from Tucson, AZ up to Eugene, OR. I visited ten major cities on my 3940ML long trip in 18 days and never got lost, not once. I had maps!
Yesterday I realized that the saying "a picture worth a thousand words" is not true for everyone when it comes about driving directions. I tried to tell a friend of mine how to drive to a furniture store that goes out of business (big savings!) in a little town close to my subdivision. The moment I took a sheet of paper she jumped to tell me "Don't you dare draw me again a map!" And that was because when I invited her to dinner to my house I draw her a very nice map with all major roads, arrows for directions, and even showing the North, but she and her husband managed to get lost, call me from the road to give them directions, and arrived here two hours later :-) They just could not figure out and use the map.
This time I started to use the in-words driving directions style. It seems in my mind I just put the map in words because when she read the directions she told me "Now, this is no better than your maps, what is North, East, West, write me down where I turn Right and where I turn Left!"
The weird thing was that yesterday I received some driving directions to a place I will go today to dinner and were all in words! The person did not list the actual address, and gave the major road from downtown St. Louis (I did not get as far in the last year), the final destination was "the third house on the left" so I couldn't just do a google map search. It was my turn to ask for the address and pop up for myself a picture map :-)
The only time I ever get lost while driving is if I have only words "turn left, turn right, bla, bla, bla"
I need to see it! I am Thomas unbeliever :-)