arabic-writing

Writing natural, correct Arabic

This skill helps you produce Arabic that a native editor would accept: grammatically correct, idiomatic, free of typos, and free of the tell-tale signs of machine translation. The single biggest failure mode is translationese — transferring English structure word-for-word instead of re-composing the meaning in Arabic. Translate ideas, not words.

Workflow

1. Pick the register and dialect. Default to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA / الفصحى) for anything formal: news, documents, legal/medical text, UI body copy, subtitles. Use a dialect (Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Maghrebi) or light "white Arabic" only when the context is conversational, marketing, social, or the user asks for it. When unsure, ask which dialect/market — never silently mix dialect into formal MSA. See register-and-style.md.
2. Compose, don't transfer. Read the whole source sentence, understand the meaning, then write it the way an Arabic speaker would — usually a verb-first sentence with the right collocation — rather than mapping English word order and prepositions.
3. Self-check every output against the two checklists below before returning it.
4. Open the relevant reference file whenever you are unsure about a specific rule. The reference files hold the detail; this page is just the map.

Top correctness checklist (apply to every Arabic output)

1. Non-human plurals take feminine-singular agreement. الكتبُ جديدةٌ ("the books are new"), السياراتُ سريعةٌ — not جُدُد/سريعات. This is the #1 error. (→ grammar.md)
2. Verb–subject order changes agreement. Verb before subject (VSO, the neutral order) stays singular and agrees only in gender: ذهب الطلابُ / ذهبت الطالباتُ. Subject before verb (SVO) takes full agreement: الطلابُ ذهبوا. (→ grammar.md)
3. Iḍāfa (الإضافة): the first noun (مضاف) takes no ال and no tanwin; the second is genitive. كتابُ الطالبِ, not الكتابُ الطالبِ. No adjective between the two parts. (→ grammar.md)
4. Adjectives follow the noun and agree on all four axes: gender, number, case, definiteness. البنتُ الكبيرةُ (both definite) vs البنتُ كبيرةٌ ("the girl is big"). (→ grammar.md)
5. Numbers 3–10 reverse gender (polarity) and take a plural genitive noun: ثلاثةُ رجالٍ, ثلاثُ فتياتٍ. 11–99 take a singular accusative (tamyīz): عشرون كتابًا. (→ grammar.md)
6. Hamza sits on the seat of the strongest vowel (kasra ئ > damma ؤ > fatha أ > sukūn ء): رئيس، مسؤول، سأل، شيء. Distinguish wasl (bare ا) from qatʿ (أ/إ) with the و-test. (→ orthography.md)
7. ة vs ه (add a suffix: /t/ → ة, /h/ → ه) and ى vs ي (trace the root; على the preposition vs عليّ the name). (→ orthography.md)
8. Use Arabic punctuation glyphs ، ؛ ؟ (not , ; ?). No space before a mark, one after. In lists, repeat و instead of using commas. (→ orthography.md)
9. Default to undiacritized text; add ḥarakāt only to remove genuine ambiguity, but always keep a meaning-distinctive shadda (درس vs درّس). Never use kashida (ـــ) to pad. (→ orthography.md)
10. Right collocations and prepositions. اتخذ قرارًا (not عمل قرارًا), أثّر في (not على in formal MSA), حصل على. (→ collocations.md, translationese.md)