---
title: "On deleting the image"
description: "A note on what happened to my writing when I removed the option of showing instead of telling."
author: "Ali Demir"
published: 2026-07-24
tags: ["writing"]
canonical: https://alideemir.com/blog/on-deleting-the-image/
source: https://alideemir.com/blog/on-deleting-the-image.md
---

# On deleting the image

I removed images from this site expecting to miss them. What I did not expect was how quickly it exposed which paragraphs had been coasting.

A diagram is a promise that the idea has a shape. Very often it does not, and the diagram is doing the work of hiding that — boxes and arrows arranged confidently enough that neither the writer nor the reader has to notice the idea underneath was never articulated. Take the diagram away and the sentence has to be written. Sometimes the sentence turns out to be easy, and the diagram was a courtesy. More often the sentence turns out to be hard, and that difficulty was the actual subject.

The same is true of screenshots. A screenshot of an error is a way of not writing the error down. It looks like evidence and functions as an excuse.

What I have found is that the constraint is not really about machines, though that is how I arrived at it. It is about the fact that anything worth saying can be said, and that reaching for a picture is most tempting at exactly the moment when I have not yet worked out what I mean.

I do lose things. Some ideas are genuinely spatial and I describe them worse than I could have drawn them. I have decided that is an acceptable price for closing an escape hatch I was using dishonestly.