Here's a confession every learning designer eventually makes, usually after a wine: nobody is reading the modules. Learners are scrolling, clicking Next, and retaining a vague impression that there was something about a policy.
The numbers say the confession is accurate. Nielsen Norman Group's research found that on an average page, people read at most 28% of the words, and more likely around 20%. Their eye-tracking studies show readers skimming in an F-shaped pattern: first lines get attention, then gazes hug the left margin, and the bottom-right of your carefully written screen might as well be classified.
In New Zealand there's an extra reason to take this seriously: in the OECD's adult skills survey, around four in ten NZ adults score below Level 3 literacy, the level needed to comfortably handle dense or lengthy texts. If your module is built from dense or lengthy text, you have designed it for a workforce other than the one most organisations actually employ.
So learners don't read. The question is what we do about it, and the answer is not another interaction. It's a different way of writing.
The root problem: SME content, copied and pasted
Most unread learning content shares a birth story. A subject matter expert hands over a document. The deadline is tight. The content gets lightly trimmed, broken into screens, and shipped.
The problem is that SME content is written from inside the expertise, organised the way the subject is structured: definitions first, background second, exceptions third, and the thing the learner actually needs to do somewhere around screen fourteen. It's not bad content. It's just facing the wrong way.
Reader-focused writing turns it around. It starts from the learner's questions (what do I do, when, and how do I know I've got it right?) and ruthlessly reorganises everything else behind them. William Zinsser said it best in On Writing Well: "Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon." Swap "American writing" for "workplace learning" and not a word needs changing.
Seven techniques that earn the read
1. Front-load everything. First sentence of the module, first sentence of every section, first words of every sentence: put the payload there, because that's where the F-pattern eyes go. "Report spills to your supervisor immediately" beats "In the event that a spill occurs, it is important to be aware that..." by exactly the number of words a skimmer will miss.
2. Cut by half, then wince and keep cutting. Nielsen's testing found that concise, scannable, objective writing improved measured usability by 124%. Half your draft is throat-clearing. Learning content suffers it worst because everyone is too polite to delete the SME's paragraphs. Be impolite. The SME's expertise is the gold. Their sentence structure is the rubble around it.
3. Write like one person talking to one person. "You must ensure compliance with the following requirements" is a memo. "Before you start, check these three things" is a colleague. People read colleagues. The fastest credibility test is reading it aloud: if you wouldn't say it across a desk, don't make two thousand staff read it.
4. Chunk for real. Chunking doesn't mean breaking a wall of text into three smaller walls. It means one idea per chunk, with a heading that states the idea (not "Overview", which is a heading the way "Food" is a menu). A skimmer reading only your headings should still leave with the plot.
5. Make the structure do the teaching. Steps go in numbered lists. Options go in tables. Decisions go in if-this-then-that lines. Prose is for meaning and motivation, not for data smuggling. Every time you turn a paragraph containing three embedded conditions into a clean list, somewhere a learner's future support ticket quietly evaporates.
6. Give them a reason at the door. The first screen has one job, and it isn't "welcome to this module." It's the case for spending ten minutes: what the learner will be able to do, and what goes wrong without it. Adults read what's useful to them. Usefulness has to be visible before the reading starts, not buried in screen nine as a reward.
7. Keep the gloss honest. A study of 6.9 million online course video sessions found engagement collapsed after six minutes regardless of video length, and informal direct content beat studio-produced polish. The lesson transfers to text: learners don't want production values. They want value, produced.
The mindset shift
Notice that none of those techniques is a writing trick, really. They're all the same act of respect performed seven ways: treating the learner as a busy, capable adult whose attention has to be earned per sentence, rather than a captive audience whose completion can be assumed per LMS report.
That shift, from content that's covered to content that's read, is the entire difference between learning that exists and learning that works. It's also a craft, and crafts can be learned: it's what we bring to our digital learning projects and what we teach in our writing workshops, including to learning designers who are excellent at everything except the part nobody ever taught them.
Your learners are already telling you how they read. The 20% they take in can be the 20% that matters most, but only if somebody writes it that way on purpose.