Plain And Precise — Development skill for Claude Code

plain-and-precise

A Claude skill that rewrites expert health and policy writing for non-expert readers without letting the claims drift: every change explained, every shift in meaning flagged, tuned to four reader types, with an editor mode and a coach mode.

Readers outside your field — a newspaper reader, a health-system CEO, a Hill staffer, a coalition member — decide in the first two sentences whether to keep going, and none of them will look up a term. Plain language is translation into the reader's words, not dumbing down. The risk is that a smoother sentence quietly changes a claim: "preventive dental services" becomes "a checkup", "associated with" becomes "leads to", "cleared" becomes "approved". So every rewrite here is checked back against what the original actually claimed, and the places where plainness cost precision are handed back as decisions, not buried.

Two modes

• Edit (default): the rewrite, ready to paste, with a change log and drift flags.
• Coach: say "coach me" or "don't rewrite it." Same reading and diagnosis, but the fixes come as patterns worked on one of your own sentences, three per round, and you do the rest. It never hands back a finished piece in coach mode unless you switch with "just edit it."

Four readers

What "plain" means depends on who is reading. Same finding, different first sentence.

Reader	Typical pieces	What plain means here
General public	Op-eds, LinkedIn posts	One idea, a person in the first two sentences, no acronyms, the first line carries the point
Payer, health-system and Hill	One-pagers, memos, letters	The ask and the number in the first paragraph; their currency is cost, access, measurement, precedent; it has to survive being forwarded
Lay summary of research	Press-style and blog paragraphs, patient-facing versions	What was studied, what was found, what it means, what it does not show; numbers exact with denominators; associations stay associations