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This won't work with ballpens, pencils, and very fine markers, poking with which draws either nothing or a hard-to-see spot. If that happens, you should draw very short vertical lines instead of dots. Never draw small circles, or one dot might look like a sukuwn سكون.
Draw the dots always from right to left, as shown
in the figure.
BTW, the word in the picture is (sh)ay# شيء, "a thing".
If you don't lift the marker much from the paper between one dot and the next, the two dots will look like a horizontal short line, and the three dots like a hat ( ^ ). Many people say this is wrong, or at least not as correct as writing the dots separately, but they keep doing it anyway. If you want my opinion, everybody can read joined dots, so they're correct. People think joining's not very correct just because it's seldom seen in print (and some schoolteachers ban it), but they still write that way because it's fast and convenient.
As two-dot-groups, three-dot-groups must always be written from right to left. Please resist your instinctive, natural urge to draw the top first. When you draw them as a hat, it too must be drawn from right to left, even if you're used to write "Hôtel" or "Khazad-dûm" with a left-to-right hat.
The exception is the final yaa# ياء ي, whose dots usually hang below its tail, not below its beginning.
When several letters in a row have dots,
drawing all of them at exactly the same height would be
ugly, not to mention confusing.
On the right you can see one possible way of writing the word qafqafah قفقفة
("shivering").
You should also place the dots at slightly different heights when several teeth come one after another, or two or more faa# فاء loops.
There's some scope for freedom in placing the dots. You may place them right above the head of the letter, or forward, and they can be high or low. Many Arabs, mainly Easterners, draw them so far away from the body of the word that you'll have trouble telling which letter each dot-group belongs to, so you'll have to guess by context if a word with two teeth, one dot above and another below is meant to be read bnk بنك or nbk نبك.
Copyright (c) 2001-2009
Jordi Mas Trullenque.
email: jordimastrullenque at gmail dot com
http://purl.oclc.org/net/arabe/dibupuntos.en.html
Last revised: 2008-03-18
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writing_arabic -> Dots