IESC Guidance Notes

These are International English Spelling Congress (IESC) Guidance Notes for proposing a spelling scheme for consideration by the Congress.

As the deadline for submission of schemes has now passed, this page is primarily for historical information.

• This is the 1st edition, dated 2018-01-29. This document will be finalised after the first session of the IESC. A template for submissions will be issued shortly thereafter. Authors should therefore not send in their works at this stage.
• Comments on these notes may be made through the Society Blog.

The object of the IESC will be to come up with an alternative system which on the one hand improves access to literacy by making English spelling more predictable and on the other hand avoids unnecessary changes which are likely to make the task of general acceptance more difficult. Subject to that overarching principle, authors are encouraged to note the following:

1. In order to be forwarded to the Expert Commission, proposals must be contained in a standard template (to be circulated separately) which will permit easier assessment by the commissioners.
2. The commissioners may suggest improvements to an author for consideration. The author does not have to accept such suggestions, but refusal to accept them may lead to the proposals not being included in the list sent by the commissioners to the reconvened IESC.
3. Authors should exercise discretion in adopting diacritics (accents) or new letters.
4. Wherever possible, letters and letter combinations should be used to represent the same sounds as occur in current spelling. (This does not preclude reducing the number of existing ways in which a sound can be represented.)
5. The proposals should not require significantly more characters to represent sounds in a standard text than in current spelling, and preferably should require fewer characters.
6. Care should be exercised in the number of ‘signwords’ to be retained. (‘Signword’ is a term for abnormally spelled words in common usage which some authors of revised spelling proposals retain to reduce intrusive changes.)
7. If the proposals are to be based on applying the underlying rules of current English spelling more faithfully, then such rules should not be unduly complicated compared with current conventions.
8. If it is proposed that changes should be introduced in stages, then the author should explain how to identify the stages, suggest how the implementation would proceed, and how conflicts with current spelling would be dealt with, (given that governments are unlikely to take on this role, at least initially).
9. The proposals should if at all possible enable speakers of the main varieties of spoken English (e.g. British, Irish, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand South African, Caribbean and others) to interpret the new conventions according to their own traditional pronunciations. This does not rule out a few different spellings where the pronunciations are highly divergent.
10. All authors submitting proposals will be asked to confirm in writing that, should their proposals be finally selected, they will not seek any remuneration or fee or impose restrictions on their proposals being used by others.