The main features of a Semitic alphabet are:
-Short vowels are not written.
-It is written from right to left.
-The order of pages in a book is also in reverse to English.
-It has many consonants, many varieties of seemingly innocent letters.
Arabic letters are also:
-joined to each other, they are like English handwriting. The rule is that a letter joins the one after it, the exception is when it doesn't.
So in essence letters within the same word will always join to each other. Some letters can join on both sides, so there is no problem there. Some letters only join on the right, so for these a word may have to be broken up into two parts.
Because letters join, they change their shape according to position in the word, so for each letter there are four varieties:
standalone.
At the beginning.
At the end of the word.
In the middle of a word.
Of course for letters that don't join on the left there is no difference between their shape at the end and in the middle.
Note also that letters are written on a line, everything above the line should be strictly above the line and everything below it should be kept strictly below it.
Look at this example:
The line drawn is the line in the notebook, keep everything in the right position relative to the line. For the following two pages I will be listing the letters and how they should be written in different positions. To do this I use the letter embedded in letter beh (2nd letter of the Arabic alphabet). The letter itself is highlighted in blue, the beh is used just to show how the letter connects. As an example:
