diff --git a/pep-0383.txt b/pep-0383.txt
index f8144fe46..5fe77cd5e 100644
--- a/pep-0383.txt
+++ b/pep-0383.txt
@@ -67,8 +67,9 @@ character-oriented APIs, allowing direct conversion of the
 environmental data to Python str objects.
 
 On POSIX systems, Python currently applies the locale's encoding to
-convert the byte data to Unicode. Non-decodable bytes will be
-represented as lone half surrogate codes U+DCxx.
+convert the byte data to Unicode, failing for characters that cannot
+be decoded. With this PEP, non-decodable bytes will be represented as
+lone half surrogate codes U+DCxx.
 
 To convert non-decodable bytes, a new error handler "python-escape" is
 introduced, which produces these half surrogates. On encoding, the