Recent scholarship points to the importance of multimodal media in learning environments, such as instructive How-To articles. This article examines how GIFs present in the YouTube Help Center play a role in effective technical communication with their liveliness and vivacity. After establishing the historical background of GIFs, this article will examine two different uses of GIFs on YouTube’s Help Center. By examining GIFs within an appropriate context, the article will analyze how instructional documents combine written text, textual designs, still images, and moving visuals so that audiences can comprehend instructions and construct meaning. Significantly, this approach to meaning-making supports learning in digital environments where all members of society engage with technology and will need to learn how to operate devices and software programs to communicate with their audiences, and most readers of instructions wish to comprehend the material quickly to perform them.
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