MY ENTHUSIASTIC CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL WHO CONTRIBUTED TO THE 3S DOCUMENT.
It's a rhetorical tour de force and WISE throughout, IMHO. I haven't
actually read section IV, but thought I'd jump in here.

Thank you, Susan, for your cogent assessment of what's in "a student's" zpd
and what's not. I use scare quotes around "student" because today scholars
emphasize that the zpd does not reside in the head of a novice but is
interactionally constructed. As you said, what a student can do in one
classroom setting may be less than what the same student can do in a more
supportive context.  And your caution, that the teaching needs to be
consistent across grades, extending previous learning and practicing what
was learned,  might be worth adding to the language of the document.

Thanks to Ed for pointing out the cautionary research on sentence
combining. The qualification I've seen in the sentence combining research
is that syntactically complex prose isn't necessarily better prose. This is
an issue especially for high school studdents but may be a developmental
issue -- the learner initially overdoing strategies for embedding before
acquiring more text-level judgment. But I agree that it's all in the HOW --
and this might be worth adding as well, that the exercises are just
busywork unless they're linked to what they accomplish -- certain kinds of
exercises for different kinds of textual work (description vs explanation
etc).

But I also agree that imitation has advantages. I think it's powerful and
way under utilized because teachers think of it as copying. It ISN"T. It's
a powerful way to invite learners into being certain kinds of writers ("I
can sound like Anais Nin." "This is how to sound like Malcolm" etc) It's
role playing, and as many of you probably know, role playing is big in
NCTE. Plus it has the advantages that Susan noted.

Judy

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