Plain Language Rewrite Skill

Plain language has a bad reputation because it's done badly — "simplifying" that quietly drops the qualifiers, rounds the numbers, and turns precise claims into vibes. Done right, it's a translation with a fidelity guarantee: every fact, number, condition, and hedge in the original survives; what changes is the packaging — sentence length, word choice, structure, and the jargon triage (most terms translate; some are load-bearing and get kept-and-defined instead, because renaming a term of art creates confusion downstream). The test is a reader who knows nothing and a checker who knows everything, both satisfied.

What This Skill Produces

• The rewrite — the same content at the target reading level, structured for the new reader
• The fidelity check — facts/numbers/qualifiers in original vs. rewrite, diffed to zero loss
• The jargon ledger — each term: translated (to what) / kept-and-defined (why it's load-bearing)
• The audience calibration — what the target reader knows, and the one-notch rule applied

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The text — verbatim; translation works on actual sentences
• The audience, concretely — "customers who don't know insurance" beats "general public"; the rewrite calibrates to what they already know, and one text can't serve experts and novices simultaneously (say so when asked to)
• The load-bearing terms — which jargon is contractual, regulatory, or searchable-by-the-reader (those get kept-and-defined; renaming "deductible" to "your share" helps nobody who then reads their policy)
• The stakes — legal/medical/financial texts keep their hedges verbatim-in-meaning; marketing texts have more freedom — the fidelity bar scales up with stakes