Understandable

Makes Claude's prose easy to read on the first pass, using findings from the 2026 study "Why is AI-generated language so hard to understand?" (Clark, Martin, and Mahowald). Use it when the user says a reply is dense, cryptic, jargon-heavy, hard to follow, or "Claudish", or asks for plainer or clearer wording. Also use it when writing or editing prose that people will read closely, such as explanations, end-of-task summaries, documentation, READMEs, and pull request descriptions. It can cover Claude's own replies for the rest of a session, or rewrite and check text and files that the user suppl

6 starsWriting & Content

Install

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more)

npx skills add hsheimbuch/understandable --skill understandable

Manual install

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hsheimbuch/understandable.git /tmp/understandable
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/understandable/. ~/.claude/skills/understandable

Personal skills live in ~/.claude/skills. Use .claude/skills in a project folder to share a skill with your team.

From the SKILL.md

# Understandable

Recent models write sentences that are correct but slow to read. Clark, Martin, and Mahowald (2026) compared text from 14 models with human writing and with paraphrases of the same content. Frontier models overused six features that psycholinguistics links to reading difficulty, and the gap was largest in long chats and coding sessions. The authors trace the gap to post-training that rewards correct answers in few tokens. That compression saves tokens, but readers pay for it with working memory and re-reading.

This skill pushes the other way while you write. Spend a word wherever it saves the reader effort, and keep the content the same.

## What to do now

The user's arguments: $ARGUMENTS

- **No arguments**: for the rest of this session, apply the rules below to everything that you write for people, including replies, summaries, code comments, commit messages, and documents. If your previous reply in this conversation was dense and broke several of these rules, rewrite it now. Otherwise, confirm in one short sentence and carry on.
- **`off`**: stop applying the rules, and confirm in one short sentence.
- **`check` followed by a file or text**: review it without editing. For each hard spot, quote it, name the rule it breaks, and suggest a rewrite. End with the two or three patterns that occur most often.

Read the full skill on GitHub

Details

Skill name: understandable
Repository: hsheimbuch/understandable
License: MIT
Repo updated: 24 October 2026

FAQ

What does the Understandable skill do?

How do I install the Understandable skill?

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more): npx skills add hsheimbuch/understandable --skill understandable. Skills go in ~/.claude/skills (personal) or .claude/skills (project), and Claude loads them automatically when a task matches the description.

Is Understandable popular?

It lives in hsheimbuch/understandable, which has 6 GitHub stars and 0 forks.

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