Readability

Readability

Overview

Single-purpose proofreader. Scans academic text (LaTeX, Markdown, plain text) for three classes of issue and presents each one individually for approval before editing:

1. Typos — misspellings, wrong words, doubled words, stray characters.
2. Grammar — subject-verb agreement, articles, tense consistency, preposition choice, pronoun reference, punctuation, run-ons, fragments, dangling modifiers.
3. Academic readability — wordiness, empty hedging, buried verbs, passive overuse where active is clearer, awkward transitions, unclear antecedents, mixed register, inconsistent terminology.

This skill is deliberately narrow. It does not restructure arguments, move sections, change claims, renumber equations, or touch citations. For those tasks, use paper-polish.

Spelling standard: American English

All spelling checks and proposed fixes must follow American English conventions, regardless of the document's current usage. Treat British/Commonwealth spellings as typos and propose the American form:

• -ise / -isation → -ize / -ization (organise → organize, analyse → analyze, characterisation → characterization)
• -our → -or (behaviour → behavior, colour → color, favour → favor, labour → labor)
• -re → -er (centre → center, fibre → fiber, metre → meter — but not the SI unit when used as a measurement word)
• -ogue → -og where standard (catalogue → catalog, dialogue → dialog in technical contexts; leave dialogue in prose unless the document is otherwise Americanized)
• Doubled consonants: travelled → traveled, modelling → modeling, labelled → labeled
• -ce noun / -se verb collapses to -se for some pairs in AmE: defence → defense, offence → offense, licence → license (noun and verb), practise → practice (verb)
• Other common swaps: grey → gray, programme → program (except UK TV/show titles), enquire → inquire, whilst → while, amongst → among, towards → toward (in formal AmE), aluminium → aluminum, sulphur → sulfur, foetus → fetus, oestrogen → estrogen
• Date formats and quotation conventions are out of scope — only spelling.

Apply the same one-at-a-time approval flow for these fixes, categorized as Typos. If the document is consistently and intentionally British (e.g. a UK journal submission), the user can say "skip category" on typos or "no" on each AmE fix — do not auto-skip.

Non-negotiable interaction rule

Every single issue is presented one at a time and requires explicit approval before any edit happens. Never batch. Never pre-apply. The user's review cadence is the whole point of the skill — if you apply fixes in bulk, the skill has failed.

For each issue:

1. Show the issue with enough context to locate it (file, line number, surrounding sentence).
2. Show the proposed fix with the change bolded so the diff is visible at a glance.
3. Give a one-line reason (what class of issue, why it helps).
4. Ask: Accept this change? (yes / no / edit)
5. Wait for the user's reply.
   • yes → apply via Edit tool, then move to the next issue.
   • no → skip, move on.