statistics-explainer

# Statistics Explainer ## What This Skill Does Rewrites a complex statistic — including percentage changes, relative risk, confidence intervals, medians, and index numbers — in plain language that a general audience can understand without sacrificing factual accuracy. ## When To Use This Skill - A statistic in your draft is accurate but you suspect a general reader will misread or misunderstand it - You have received data containing terms like "relative risk," "odds ratio," "confidence interval," or "standard deviation" and need to explain them in copy - An editor or sub-editor has flagged a statistic as confusing - You want to check your own plain-language rewrite against a more rigorous version ## What You Need To Provide **Required:** The statistic as it appears in the source (exact wording or data point). The context — what the statistic is measuring and from what study, report, or dataset. **Optional:** The audience (general public, specialist readers, etc.); the publication register (tabloid, broadsheet, academic journal); any related comparison figure that might help contextualise it. ## How the Assistant Approaches This 1. Identifies the statistical concept being used and checks for common misinterpretation traps (e.g. relative vs absolute risk, percentage point vs percentage change). 2. Rewrites the statistic using plain numbers and concrete comparisons — avoiding jargon, passive constructions, and ambiguous framing. 3. Flags any cases where the plain-language ve...