Please pass the tissues

Firstly, thank you for the outpouring of well wishes for my friend. Whether it was the strength of all of us lent to her or the miracles of modern medicine, she came through the surgery and this part of her journey very well. Your support was much, much appreciated.

Despite the massive wave of relief I'm feeling, I'm somehow suffering a nasty relapse of whatever cold/flu took me down two weeks ago. I've been trying to knit, but whatever congestion is in my lungs and nose seems to have spread to my brain, and I found myself totally unable to follow the written instructions for the cables for the collar of Juno. After two knitting sessions in which I knit, instead of the delicately interwoven cables that Rowan planned for me, some knitterly version of spaghetti, I finally ripped back the whole thing and made myself a cheat sheet.

It's been a long time since I tried to knit cables from words instead of a chart and it seems like I've totally forgotten how. I kept loosing my place in a line, messing up C4B and C4R and dudes....why can't the whole world just do it the way I like it and give me charts?

I like to be able to see what I'm knitting, and the beauty of charts is that I can take one look at the chart and one look at my knitting and see that I'm not making anything like the picture and know I've arsed it up again. With words I find it hard to see how they stack up. It's possible of course, with my head less full of the products of a head cold, to read written instructions and "see" what it's supposed to look like, but wouldn't the addition of a chart make it way, way easier? Am I in the minority? Do the largest segment of knitters like the words?

Now, I'm not a pattern writer or a designer, just a lowly knitter with a nasty head cold and a slightly negative attitude right this minute (those two things are probably related) and I know that there are die hard "word" knitters who hate charts, but I wonder why the writers, publishers and designers don't give us both? Is it cultural? Is it more expensive? Prohibitively so? What say you, anybody out there with an answer? Why not provide both words and charts on patterns?