An editing method for prose that has to sound like a person wrote it.
Most humanizer tools work from a word list: find "delve", cut the em-dashes, break up the rule-of-three. That cleans the surface and leaves the problem, because prose reads mechanical when it was written without the attention a person pays before choosing words. Respeak reproduces that attention instead. The name is the core move: explain the draft aloud to the person it's for, and if the spoken explanation is clearer than the draft, the explanation is the draft.
What the skill does with your text:
- builds a proposition ledger first, so no fact, number, name, or claim drifts during the rewrite
- re-speaks the draft against five tests: novice-question, storyboard, read-aloud, cold-read, context
- removes the mechanical signals that are actually present, rather than sanding everything into generic plainness
- verifies the rewrite against the ledger, then finishes with one stranger read and fixes only the precise tell it finds
It also carries per-surface registers — teaching and explanatory prose, UI and product copy, marketing, narration over visuals, localisation — and a verification ladder, so the model never claims a stronger check than the one it ran.
Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add quietmill/respeak
/plugin install respeak@quietmill
Codex CLI (skills are folders in ~/.codex/skills/):
git clone https://github.com/quietmill/respeak
cp -r respeak/skills/respeak ~/.codex/skills/
Or copy skills/respeak/SKILL.md anywhere your agent reads skills from.
Ask for what you actually want; the skill picks the smallest output mode that serves it:
- Silent rewrite — finished copy only, no commentary
- Ruling round — before → after pairs on contested lines, you decide
- Audit — text untouched, precise problems listed with fixes
- Cohesion review — continuity, terminology, and voice across a whole sequence
Respeak stays domain-agnostic on purpose. Keep your house voice — terminology, banked phrasing decisions, per-project registers — in a separate overlay skill that stacks on top of this one and wins conflicts. When you accept or reject a contested line, record the pair and the reason. Positive examples teach an editor your voice faster than any list of bans.
MIT © Quietmill Ltd