Writing: Register, Cohesion, and Controlled Accuracy
The Writing domain evaluates your ability to produce organized formal MSA in tasks such as a short essay, a formal email, or a report. Raters look for task completion, paragraph coherence, grammatical control, and register consistency. You are not rewarded for length alone; accurate, connected sentences score better than long, ungrammatical lists.
Core rules and concepts
- Use formal MSA throughout: avoid dialect forms such as بدي or مش; prefer أريد and ليس.
- Build paragraphs with a topic sentence, two or three supporting sentences, and a closing sentence.
- Make adjectives agree with nouns in gender, number, definiteness, and case.
- Choose verb aspect deliberately: الماضي for completed events, المضارع for current or habitual actions, والأمر for directives.
- Use connectors to show logic: أولاً, بالإضافة إلى ذلك, في حين أن, لذلك, ختاماً.
- Use Arabic punctuation: الفاصلة ، and الفاصلة المنقوطة ؛; do not copy English commas and semicolons.
Worked example
Prompt: Write one formal sentence saying that the project was delayed because funding was not approved. Draft: تأخر المشروع بسبب عدم الموافقة على التمويل. Reasoning: تأخر is a past intransitive verb, so المشروع is its subject. بسبب is a prepositional phrase meaning because of, followed by the noun عدم الموافقة (lack of approval). على التمويل completes the verbal noun. This is more idiomatic than التمويل لم يوافق, which literally says the funding did not agree. A safe alternative is لم تتم الموافقة على التمويل.
Traps that cost marks
- Dialect leakage in an otherwise formal text.
- English word order, especially placing the verb after a long subject.
- Missing feminine or plural agreement on adjectives and verbs.
- Stringing connectors without real logical relationships.
- Writing under the required word count or ignoring the task format, such as omitting a salutation in an email.
- Using English punctuation or transliterated words instead of Arabic terms.