Trying to understand the proposed health care bill is a task in it's self. People feel very strongly about the issue and other people don't know much about it at all. A lot of news outlets and websites have used graphics to simplify health care for those who don't understand. However these graphics aren't always helpful and make the issue even more confusing.
For example the LA Times provided a graphic that broke down how much the health care bill would cost over time. It provides the total cost per year ( in billions of dollars) in a graph. Below that it shows you the effect the bill would have on the national deficit per year (in billions of dollars) in another graph.
There are short, written explanations of each graph to help the viewer understand what they are looking at. It is color coded, green for cost, and yellow for impact on the deficit. However it also has a legend with four different colors when only two of the four are used. The lighter green and yellow are supposed to represent the original senate bill but there is no corresponding graph.
This confusion causes the viewer to look for something that is not there. There seems to be no point to have the lighter colors unless they showed representing graphs. So although this graph overall is helpful to understanding the bill, it could be more poignant. Graphics should help the viewer understand the issue faster and easier than this.
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You definitely found a graphic which was confusing. Even after looking at it for a while I couldn't really understand what it was trying to get across.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that the color coded chart doesn't help to understand the graphic at all. There is too much going on with the two graphs and all the text that surrounds them.
Something I noticed was that you explained the graph rather than explaining what you felt was significant/insignificant about it. Though you did say you found it confusing and said it could be more poignant, you don't explain exactly why or how.
It was also hard to tell what you found important in the graphic/article. This could've been done by bolding the information that you found essential to your post.
You did a good job at keeping the post short and concise. It flowed well and was easy to read. The first two links fit well into the article, however the last one didn't seem to fit as well. Perhaps I just didn't get what you were trying to get across, but I didn't see any meaning for it to be there.