plain-language

The plain-language skill provides a systematic framework for drafting and refining text to ensure immediate reader comprehension. Designed for writers, developers, and technical communicators, this skill is essential for Phase 4 and 5 content creation where clarity is prioritized over complexity. By leveraging techniques from the Plain Writing Act of 2010 and the broader Plain Language Movement, it helps reduce cognitive load, accelerate reading speed, and improve accessibility for diverse audiences, including technical stakeholders who prefer direct communication over opaque jargon.

• Increases active voice usage to exceed 80% targets, ensuring direct action-oriented communication.

• Enforces sentence length constraints, maintaining an average of under 25 words to optimize readability.

• Provides automated guidance on jargon elimination, favoring simple, standard terminology over obscure buzzwords.

• Includes specific techniques to mitigate nominalization and remove weasel words or unnecessary redundancies.

• Categorizes application modes into Tutorial, How-To, Reference, and Explanation for context-aware writing styles.

• Implements measurement rubrics for Flesch-Kincaid readability and active voice percentage tracking.

• Best used when refining documentation, API guides, technical tutorials, or project README files.

• Users should monitor outputs for passive voice markers such as 'was/were + past participle + by'.

• Expect inputs to be drafted content requiring simplification and outputs to be cleaner, punchier, and more accessible revisions.

• Constraint: Technical precision should be balanced with clarity; jargon is permitted only if clearly defined on first use.

• Recommended for managing content where high cognitive load is a barrier to adoption or developer onboarding success.

• Use the provided quality checklist to audit compliance with readability metrics before final publication.