A Claude Code skill for interactive, guided study of textbooks, papers, and technical books.

Two common failure modes when studying dense material:

1. Passive reading — you lose focus and skim without absorbing
2. Passive listening — someone explains it to you and you think you understand, but you don't

Step 0: Material prep — Automatically converts your source material (PDF, EPUB, DOCX, HTML) to clean Markdown via markitdown. Detects unsupported formats (scanned PDFs, images) and tells you upfront.

Then a 5-step interactive cycle per section:

1. Read — Claude reads the entire section
2. Distill — Identifies 3-5 core learning points
3. Guide — Poses questions first, then feeds source text in small segments
4. Dialogue — You respond; Claude probes, corrects, or advances
5. Notes — Claude guides you to articulate what you learned, then compiles structured notes

• Questions before text — you read with purpose, not passively
• Never dumps explanations — if you're wrong, it asks smaller sub-questions instead of giving the answer
• Guided note-taking — you say what you learned; Claude organizes it. Not the other way around
• Anti-drift — unit boundary checks, auto-pause after 3 rounds on the same concept, no jumping ahead
• Language-adaptive — responds in whatever language you use

Copy SKILL.md to your Claude Code skills directory:

# Create skill directory
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/guided-reading

# Copy the skill file
cp SKILL.md ~/.claude/skills/guided-reading/SKILL.md

In Claude Code, say things like:

• "Let's study chapter 3"
• "Read the next section"
• "Continue studying"
• /guided-reading

During a session:

MIT