Ana Gomes

You've written your masterpiece (or you're in the middle of crafting it). Now what? One major task is choosing your publishing route: self-publishing, hybrid, or traditional. The self-publishing path is more advantageous: more creative control, higher royalty rates (60% vs. 5-10%), and faster production (days or weeks, instead of months). It's your book, and you should capitalize on it. #TheSavvyRedPen #SelfPublishing #BookEditor #NonfictionAuthors

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We did it! What once seemed impossible has now happened – we’ve published our ebook on digital accessibility in e‑publishing. Huge thanks to Ewelina Szyszkowska for keeping us all so well organized and on track! The topic of accessible ebooks is far more complex than it might seem. It shares a lot with web accessibility, but also requires a deep understanding of how ebooks are created and structured. In this publication, we’ve gathered the knowledge we’ve been building up for years – and now it’s all in one place. You’ll also find my article in the book, where I describe how we handle EPUB testing and validation at Have a Book. Paweł Miąsik from Fundacja Polskich Niewidomych i Słabowidzących "Trakt" also writes on the topic, sharing how this process looks from the perspective of a blind tester. The ebook is free to download – and, most importantly, available in two language versions: English and Polish. Highly recommend! 👉https://lnkd.in/dQKhFqi6

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Technical writers know where SME collaboration breaks down. 🤝 Here's how to bridge the gap: 1. Your brain dump isn't documentation-ready → Walk us through it like you're teaching someone completely new → We'll organize it. But we need the complete picture first 2. We need real examples, not just concepts → Give us specific scenarios with actual values, error cases, edge situations → We turn them into clear instructions 3. 30 minutes now saves 3 hours later → Block 30 minutes for review. Correcting us early is faster than fixing docs after users find mistakes → Your expertise catches what we miss 4. Loop us in early, not 2 days before launch → Include us when the feature is planned, not when it's shipping → Early collaboration means fewer post-launch revisions 5. "It's intuitive" means different things to experts vs. users → Tell us what trips people up during testing → We bridge the gap 6. We're not here to make you look bad → Treat us as partners, not obstacles → Strong partnerships create docs users trust Better collaboration = better documentation. SME + Tech Writer = User Success. Which point resonates most with your SME experience? Drop the number (1-6) below. 👇 Save this for your next SME collaboration conversation. Share this with a technical writer who works closely with SMEs. Want more career insights for technical writers: 1. Follow Technical Writer HQ 2. Like the post 3. Repost to your network

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Whenever I think of localization, I remember one specific adaptation I did when translating John Passarella's Supernatural: Cold Fire into Brazilian Portuguese. (Amazing book, by the way. Even if you're unfamiliar with the series it's based on!) For quick context: it's a horror story in which the main characters must uncover the mystery of a monster that looks like a girl who kills people with a tentacle. At some point, still not knowing the girl's actual name, one of the characters off-handedly refers to her as "Tentacle Tessa". The sentence was something along the lines of "Tentacle Tessa doesn't attack those types of people". It's some simple wordplay with alliteration, and I could have done the same in Portuguese with a Brazilian name, something like "Teresa Tentáculo" or "Tatiane Tentáculo", but I kept getting this feeling in the back of my mind that it didn't really hit the same as it did in the original. It made it feel more like the character was actually trying to name the monster rather than coming up with a quick joke on the spot. Eventually, though, I came up with a name I was happy with: "Maria Tentáculo". So, what was my thought process? In Brazil, it's very common for people's first names to consist of two names, and "Maria" is quite the popular choice for such. There are many people called "Maria Luiza", "Maria Eduarda", "Maria Lúcia", etc. Moreover, the name Maria is used in the term "Maria Fumaça" (a more "poetic" way to refer to a steam locomotive) and in the expression "Maria vai com as outras" (someone who follows others blindly). In these last two examples, the meanings aren't important, but what I want to show is that the name Maria has a degree of cultural and linguistic relevance to Brazilians. It's a name that can be used to create a certain type of expectation, and when the character in the book says "Maria Tentáculo", it just clicks. It wasn't necessary to keep the alliteration from the English original; finding an effective way to convey the same playfulness in Portuguese is what did the trick. And, if we were to analyze this even deeper, I think I have a theory on why the alliteration in this case worked better in English than Portuguese, at least to my ears. Due to the word order in English, we get the most "critical" information first in "Tentacle Tessa": the tentacle. The main thing we know about the monster. However, the word order in Portuguese doesn't allow us to start this with "Tentáculo". Even if the name hadn't been adapted, it'd still need to be inverted, written as "Tessa Tentáculo". The information we get first, therefore, is a random name instead of the main trait. So, if the name itself doesn't carry some sort of relevance, it feels a bit off. Lots and lots of thoughts for a small detail in an entire book, but this is the beauty of literature. The small details matter. They're what makes our writing come alive, and, when translating, we need to do justice to the original in every way possible.

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Final call to doc folks: Let’s get ready for the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the EU AI Act Because the European Accessibility Act (effective June 28, 2025) and the EU AI Act (effective August 2, 2025) are about to reshape the way we build and document AI systems, Eagle Eyes recommends  training AI (and your teams) with the following resources: 1.     EU AI Act 2.     European Accessibility Act (EAA) 3.     EU Interinstitutional Style Guide 4.     Federal Plain Language Guidelines 5.     LinkedIn Learning – Writing in Plain English 6.     Merriam-Webster Dictionary 7.     Microsoft Style Guide 8.     The Conscious English Guide 9.     The Elements of Style (Strunk & White) 10.                            The Global English Style Guide 11.                            WCAG 2.2 / W3C WCAG 2.2 Guidelines 👉 I haven’t included readability checkers here because although the EU AI Act requires content to be understandable to an eighth-grade reading level, I’m not convinced any current readability checker can reliably evaluate technical documentation. What do you think? Which tools (if any) have worked well for you for readability checking? Equally important: Human oversight and transparency requirements The EU AI Act mandates that: Humans remain meaningfully involved in overseeing AI outputs, especially when AI assists or automates documentation, translation, or customer communications. Documentation clearly describes the AI system’s purpose, functionality, limitations, and known risks, in language appropriate to the target audience. Accessibility and inclusion are non-negotiable: AI-generated visuals and content must reflect a diversity of ages, cultures, and disabilities. 👉 Questions for you: What other resources, policies, or guidelines would you add? How are you preparing to document human oversight, risk mitigation, and AI transparency in your deliverables? What best practices can we share with each other to make sure we’re ready? 💬 Please share your recommendations, ideas, or lessons learned in the comments. Let’s build a collective knowledge base that helps us all meet these new requirements. Review the EU AI Act Cheat Sheet (below) and thanks @Oliver Patel for creating it. If you need links to  my recommended training docs for this, contact me and I will send them to you. #Documentation #AI #Accessibility #EUAIAct #PlainLanguage #HumanOversight #EAA https://lnkd.in/gEHdxUHQ

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This is a nice example of solving a real journalism problem with a specialized model instead of pulling out the big LLM bazooka. PÚBLICO built an interactive tool to help Portuguese students figure out which university degrees match their interests and career goals. Behind the scenes, they had to connect 1,500 local degree programs to 900 U.S. occupations. Not just string matches, but conceptual links like “Communication Sciences” → journalism careers. To do this, they used zero-shot classification with a Hugging Face pipeline in just three lines of code. No prompt tweaking or dealing with chatty responses that don’t fit cleanly into dataframes. Also cheaper and far more energy-efficient than a big chatbot. Rui Barros shared a behind-the-scenes look at how they did it (link in comments). Great use case of practical AI in journalism to build something genuinely useful for readers!

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