A reflective Arabic critic's voice, packaged as a Claude skill.
Long-form criticism and essays in formal Modern Standard Arabic that read a work as an argument,
define things by what they are not, and end on an open question instead of a verdict.
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This skill was generated by PersonaWriter from one long-form Arabic music-criticism essay (about 2,500 words), then tested on unrelated topics and refined. It is a complete, real example of what PersonaWriter builds: a style guide made of decisions, a never-list, measured dosage, and scripts that check every draft.
The output is always Arabic (formal MSA), even if you ask in English or German.
| Ask for | You get |
|---|---|
| A review of an album, film, book, series, exhibition or game | A 900-1,400 word essay that finds the work's central tension, reads it through a few small details, gives the work its fairest objection, and closes without a star rating |
| An essay on a social habit or cultural trend | The same argument shape applied to a habit: voice messages, photo hoarding, a new slang word |
| A long-form analysis of an artist or a body of work | Periods placed on an axis, then an argument for why the new work changes the axis |
| An opinion piece with a critic's voice | A qualified, fair argument that concedes the awkward fact instead of preaching |
| "Rewrite this review in the critic's voice" | Your facts, names and quotes kept, the structure rebuilt around an argument, plot or tracklist summary dropped |
| Short forms (600-1,000 words), and plain announcements or emails | A lighter version: one image, one first-person pivot, same open ending; for plain copy only the negation opener and calm hedges carry over |
The voice in brief: long sentences that build a qualified claim, then a short, blunt one that lands it. "Not X, but Y" (ليس ... وإنما) as the engine of every thesis. The work treated as an agent that bets and insists. One hedge and one precision word per claim. One everyday image per abstraction. No exclamation marks, no lists, no superlatives, no «في الختام».
From the first example, an essay on photographing everything and never looking at the photos (similarity 97/100, all dosage and never-list checks pass):
الفكرة الشائعة أن الصورة تحفظ ما يفلت من الذاكرة، وأن من يصوّر عشاءً أو غروبًا أو طفلًا يطفئ شموعه إنما يدّخر شيئًا للمستقبل، أو على الأقل يمنح المستقبل فرصة لأن يتذكر. قد يكون هذا صحيحًا في الصورة الواحدة التي نلتقطها بعد تردد، لكنه يصبح أقل إقناعًا حين نلتقط أربعين صورة للمشهد نفسه ثم نعد أنفسنا بعبارة “سأرتبها لاحقًا”، وهي عبارة تشبه في وظيفتها وعدًا يقطعه المرء لنفسه في مطلع كل عام.
The example page also shows how the first draft failed the signature check (too many negation frames and hedges) and what was cut to fix it.
All examples, each with its check results:
| Essay | Genre | Length | Similarity |
|---|---|---|---|
| The photos we never look at | Essay on a social habit | ~550 words | 97/100 |
| Infinite regress, from Zeno to Gödel (@moustafarhat) | Long-form philosophy essay | ~1,270 words | 97/100 |
Wrote something good with this skill? Add it to the examples so others can see what the voice does on new subjects:
- Add
examples/<short-title>.mdwith the prompt you used (or a one-line summary), the essay inside<div dir="rtl">, and the output of the three checks (see How drafts are checked). - Add a row to the table above, with your GitHub handle if you want credit.
- Open a pull request. No account to spare? Open an issue and paste the essay there.
Please share only your own original text, check names, dates and titles, and don't include quotes you can't verify. Examples that fail a check are welcome too, with a line on why; they show where the voice bends.
Claude Code (plugin marketplace):
/plugin marketplace add moustafarhat/arabic-critic-essay-writer
/plugin install arabic-critic-essay-writer@arabic-critic-essay-writer
Claude Code (manual):
git clone https://github.com/moustafarhat/arabic-critic-essay-writer.git
cp -r arabic-critic-essay-writer/skills/arabic-critic-essay-writer ~/.claude/skills/Windows (PowerShell)
git clone https://github.com/moustafarhat/arabic-critic-essay-writer.git
Copy-Item -Recurse arabic-critic-essay-writer\skills\arabic-critic-essay-writer "$HOME\.claude\skills\"claude.ai / Claude Desktop: download arabic-critic-essay-writer.zip from the
latest release, then
open Settings → Capabilities → Skills and upload it. (Code execution must be enabled for the checks.)
Just ask. For example:
- «اكتب مراجعة لألبوم ... بأسلوب الناقد»
- «مقال نقدي بنفس الأسلوب عن ظاهرة ...»
- "Write a review of this film in the critic's voice" (the essay comes back in Arabic)
- Paste a flat review and say «أعد كتابتها بهذا الأسلوب»
Dials you can turn: the critic's presence (more or less first person), the weight of the concession, sentence length, how much is quoted, and length.
Give it facts. The skill will not invent quotes, lyrics, scenes or dates. If it doesn't know a work well enough, it asks for notes or writes only about what you supplied.
The skill checks its own drafts with PersonaWriter's style_stats.py (standard-library Python 3.9+):
cd skills/arabic-critic-essay-writer
python scripts/style_stats.py compare references/profile.json draft.txt # rhythm score + top fixes
python scripts/style_stats.py check references/markers.json draft.txt # dosage + never-list
python scripts/style_stats.py overlap draft.txt references/anchors.md # nothing copiedmarkers.json encodes the style's signature moves with target rates (for example 3-9
negation-then-correction frames per 1,000 words) and its never-list (exclamation marks,
superlatives, «في الختام», stand-alone «أنا», AI filler like «من الجدير بالذكر»).
- Provisional profile: learned from one essay, one genre (music criticism). Other genres are marked as inference in the style guide.
- The source reads like a translation from English criticism. The skill is told to write native, idiomatic Arabic and not to copy its calques.
The skill stores patterns and six one-sentence anchors, never passages of the source. The source essay is not named, and output is original writing in a manner, never presented as the source author's work. No invented quotes or facts.
Have a voice you want to reuse (yours, your publication's, a writer you study)? Use PersonaWriter on a few thousand words of it.
.
├── .claude-plugin/ # plugin + marketplace manifests (Claude Code)
├── skills/arabic-critic-essay-writer/ # the skill (this folder is what gets installed)
│ ├── SKILL.md # voice, writing procedure, dials, guardrails
│ ├── references/ # style guide, anchors, profile.json, markers.json
│ ├── scripts/style_stats.py # compare, check, overlap, analyze
│ └── tests/ # python tests/run_tests.py
└── examples/ # full example outputs with their check results
MIT. See LICENSE.