readability-check

A review of multi-paragraph writing that checks how easy it is to read, especially for people who read English as a second language.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps improve blog drafts and other longer prose. It is not intended for short titles, descriptions, or profile text.
Why use it?
It identifies unclear structure, long or difficult sentences, passive wording, filler, and hard words before publication.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jdevalk/skills/readability-check
Any agent
npx skills add jdevalk/skills --skill readability-check
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jdevalk/skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 179 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,932 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00179 $0.02932
Opus 5 $0.00089 $0.01466
Sonnet 5 $0.00036 $0.00586
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00293

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7a3e93e32be8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

readability-check scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

readability-check/SKILL.md · 189 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 189 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Readability check

Run a readability audit on a blog post draft or other multi-paragraph prose. Use when the user asks to check readability ("check readability", "readability pass", "is this readable"), or proactively after a substantial draft is complete — as a second pass after the blog-drafting skill's critical read, not during active drafting.

For short strings — page titles, meta descriptions, schema description fields, FAQ answers, profile bios, repo taglines — use the metadata-check skill. Flesch scoring and the ten-category rubric below don't fit a 5–30 word string and will mislead.

For whether a post earns a ranking — search intent fit, keyphrase placement, E-E-A-T, internal linking — chain into the content-seo skill after this audit. Readability is a prerequisite for ranking, not a substitute.

Audience calibration

Always assume the reader reads English as a second language. That's the default, not a fallback.

In technical posts, the technical sections can use domain terms the audience expects — but any non-technical paragraph (introduction, context, conclusion, transitions, examples, analogies) must be readable by a non-technical L2 reader. Setup and motivation paragraphs carry the post for readers who don't know the domain yet; they're where you lose people.

Conversational beats formal. Posts that address the reader directly ("you", "your") and occasionally ask them a question hold L2 readers far better than impersonal prose. Flag long stretches of detached, third-person register in non-technical sections.

How readers actually read

Readers scan before they commit. They look at the headings, the first paragraph, and the first sentence of each paragraph, and decide from those alone whether to read on. Search engines and AI systems weight the same elements when working out what a text is about. That's why the audit leans hard on those three places: a post whose headings and first sentences carry the argument works for scanners, full readers, and machines at once.

Read the full file on GitHub · 189 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 189 lines · 179 tokens per session scan A 7a3e93e32be8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

readability-check is a skill published in the GitHub repository jdevalk/skills (97 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 179 tokens to every session and 2,932 once invoked, about $0.0009 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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