plain-language-summary

plain-language-summary is a skill for Claude Code from muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills. It costs 0 tokens per session (2,931 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for explaining research to people without specialist knowledge. It covers lay summaries, plain-language abstracts, patient summaries, policy briefs, and public research communications.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when preparing funder-required public summaries, patient information, media materials, policy briefs, or other non-specialist research content.
Why use it?
It helps turn academic wording into clear explanations of what was done, what was found, and why it matters.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the academic-writer plugin — 27 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when preparing funder-required public summaries, patient information, media materials, policy briefs, or other non-specialist research content.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/plain-language-summary
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.

Any agent
npx skills add muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills --skill plain-language-summary
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install academic-writer, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 27 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for plain-language-summary

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/plain-language-summary/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/plain-language-summary)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/plain-language-summary"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/plain-language-summary/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for plain-language-summary

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/plain-language-summary"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/plain-language-summary.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,931 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00000 $0.02931
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01465
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00586
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00293

Measured 11d ago against content hash b38bb7550b4c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

plain-language-summary 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 11d 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.

skills/plain-language-summary/SKILL.md · 379 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 379 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Plain-Language Summary

Plain-language summaries (also called lay summaries, plain-language abstracts, or public summaries) translate research for non-expert audiences. Unlike academic writing, they prioritise accessibility, avoid jargon, and connect findings to real-world relevance. Many funders now require them as a condition of grant funding.


What Is a Lay Summary?

Purpose: Enable a non-specialist audience to understand what you did, what you found, and why it matters.

Audience: Public, patients, policymakers, media, school students, or interdisciplinary colleagues.

Length: Typically 100–250 words, though requirements vary.

Key difference from abstracts: Abstracts summarise for experts; lay summaries explain for non-experts.


Funder Requirements

Wellcome Trust

Requirement: Lay summary required for all grants.

Length: Up to 400 characters (very short) for application; longer summary may be required for dissemination.

Audience: General public.

Key guidance: Explain what you're doing and why it's important without using technical language.

NIHR (National Institute for Health Research)

Requirement: Plain English summary required.

Length: 250 words maximum.

Audience: Patients, public, healthcare professionals.

Criteria:

  • Clear and jargon-free
  • Explains why the research matters to patients
  • Uses active voice

EU Horizon Europe

Requirement: Lay summary for each published output.

Length: 1,000 characters minimum (~150 words).

Content: What the project is about, main results, and potential impact.

Audience: Citizens, policymakers, media.

NHMRC (Australia)

Requirement: Plain language summary required.

Length: 150–200 words.

Audience: General public.

NIH (US)

Requirement: Public access compliance; lay summaries increasingly expected.

Trend: NIH has moved toward requiring plain-language summaries of funded research.


Journal Requirements

Read the full file on GitHub · 379 lines

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. 11d ago First seen · 379 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A b38bb7550b4c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

plain-language-summary is a skill published in the GitHub repository muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills (6 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 2,931 tokens. 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 2026-08-31.

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