Plain
Rewrite a piece of jargon-heavy or convoluted text into plain language a non-specialist can follow — unpack the jargon, break up tangled sentences, and cut academese and business-speak while keeping every point and staying precise. Use when the user explicitly asks to put something in plain language, simplify the wording, make a passage accessible, explain it like a human, or strip jargon from a document or draft they point to, including text just produced in the conversation. Do not trigger as unprompted cleanup of text the user has not asked to change; when the problem is length use the tighten or distil skill.From its SKILL.md
npx -y skills add shihyuho/skills --skill plainAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
One thing to look at
- 0 stars0 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.
What its file declares
Copied from the file, not written here
The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.
SKILL.md
3.2 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
plain
Re-examine a passage that is hard to follow and rewrite it in plain language a non-specialist can read. Every point stays; what goes is the jargon, the abstraction, and the tangled syntax that hid the meaning. Plain language is meaning-preserving, not meaning-losing — clear is not the same as vague.
What to put in plain language
The user identifies the target — pasted text, a file path, or a passage in this conversation. If they invoke the skill without naming one, work on the last substantial passage you wrote. Ask only if the target is genuinely ambiguous.
Aim for a smart reader who is not in this field. If the user names a specific audience, write for that one instead.
Approach
A convoluted passage does not get clearer by softening a word here and there — the tangled sentence structure and buried actors survive the edit. Do not patch. Work out what the passage is actually saying underneath the jargon, then say it the way you would explain it to a sharp colleague from outside the field.
Concretely:
- Unpack jargon and acronyms — name the thing in ordinary words; expand an acronym on first use. Keep a technical term only when it is load-bearing, and define it briefly the first time.
- Undo nominalizations — "make a decision" → "decide", "the implementation of X" → "implementing X".
- Name the actor — turn hidden-subject passives ("a review was conducted") into who did what ("we reviewed it").
- Shorten the words — pick the short common word over the long Latinate one where it carries the same meaning.
- Split tangled sentences — break a sentence with stacked subordinate clauses into two or three plain ones.
- Ground the abstract — replace an abstract noun with the concrete thing it stands for where that lands better.
Preserve
- Every point. This is not distilling: keep all the content. Unpacking a term may cost a few extra words, and that is fine — plain is not measured by word count.
- Precision. Plain is not vague. Do not trade away technical accuracy or necessary caveats to sound simpler.
- Necessary technical terms. Define them, do not delete them; some terms are the precise word and have no plain equivalent.
- Register. Plain is not the same as casual — keep the formality the context calls for.
- Code, quotes, numbers, names. Reproduce verbatim.
Output
Give the rewritten text, then a short report: which jargon and tangled structures were simplified, and any technical term you kept and defined rather than replaced.