For most, the goal for a new English writing system is to match the phonemic capabilities of Finnish or Portuguese. These writing systems provide a guide to pronunciation. Anything written in these systems can be correctly pronounced and anything correctly pronounced can be easily spelled. Someone who knew the system could read aloud a page in a book could be understood by native speakers. Their pronunciations would not be perfect but they would be close enough for communication.

New Follick (NuFolik) is a solution to some of the problems of Traditional English Orthography (TO). As with many solutions, there are some costs - primarily a loss of familiarity and reading speed - and some benefits such as consistency, regularity, and simplified spelling. To properly weigh the trade-offs, one should begin with a description of the problems.  The Trouble with Spelling

English speakers typically distinguish 18 vowel sounds (6 long, 6 checked or short, 6 diphthongs) and perhaps a few R-blends which might otherwise have ambiguous spelling. The division in the free-vowel cell indicates the phonemes that are left out of some orthographies, e.g., the shwa (an unstressed uh sound) and the long schwa (a stressed sound found in words such as HER).

Particularly problematic are the sounds that are missing in Latin based languages (such as Portuguese above): the /I/ short i sound in *it, the /ou/ long o sound in *owe , the /u/ short u sound in *hook , and the /ae/ sound in *ax.¹ .  Most of the vowel ambiguity would be solved with 4 new characters for the long vowels². Some European writing systems have used the acute accent [ á í ] or the umlaut [ ä ü ] to identify the long sounds.  IPA also uses two dots (a colon) but places them after the letter [ a: u: ]. These markers are referred to here as extenders.

Since English (TO) has a average of 14 spelling patterns for each sound, there is no single spelling pattern that will look right more than about 40% of the time.  In a highly phonemic univalent system, once a spelling pattern is selected, it has to be used to represent every instance of a particular phoneme or sound category. All phonemic spellings will cause some visual disruption or dissonance about 60% to the time. Nu Folik makes a number of concessions to TO to reduce the level of visual disruption. Some will argue that there were too many concessions and others will argue that there were not enough³.

New Follick (NF) is an IPA-askybet. Unlike standard IPA notation, NF does not use any symbols or characters thare are not found in the ASCII or QWERTY keyboard character set. ASCII has 128 positions, 52 are used for letters. This would be more than enough to represent 43 English phonemes⁴. However, the conventional practice is to use two letters to represent the same set of sounds (A=a, B=b) and to use three characters (c, x, and q) to represent the same sounds as (k (s), ks, and kw).