Rebecca Nowacek (2011) observes that “scholarship on transfer in the field of rheto-ric and composition has understandably focused on first year composition: what knowledge and abilities transfer out of, and less commonly, into FYC ” (p. 99). There is consensus in this research that all too often students fail to transfer skills learned in their first-year composition courses to other writing contexts across the curric-ulum. There is also consensus that composition instructors wishing to encourage transfer should focus on metacognitive awareness of writing processes; understand-ing of key writing studies concepts like rhetorical situation, genre, and discourse community; and making explicit connections to students ’ future college and pro-fessional reading and writing tasks (Beaufort, 2007; Bergmann & Zepernick, 2007; Clark & Hernandez, 2011; Fishman & Reiff, 2008; Wardle, 2007). What scholars have focused less attention on is how these lessons learned from the research on transfer and first-year composition might inform the design not just of first-year composi-tion courses, but of university writing across the curriculum (WAC) efforts, from a student’s first year to his or her final semester. With the exception of Anne Beaufort (2007) and David Smit (2004), even researchers who have studied courses across disciplines have focused their advice not on the structural design of campus WAC programs, but on what individual instructors can do to encourage transfer (Caroll,

WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM linkages are generally acknowledged to help students improve as writers and engage more deeply in disciplinary course content. However, the extent to which the literacy skills that are taught in general writing courses transfer to the specific writing needs of a particular discipline remains a debatable issue. Referring to first year writing courses, Amy Devitt notes that writing courses “have been attacked as not useful, in part because of a potential lack of transferability of the general writing skills learned in composition courses to the particular writing tasks students will later confront” ( ). Margaret Mansfield similarly maintains that attempts to reproduce real world writing in the classroom are “intrinsically doomed” ( ), as do many of the essays in Joseph Petraglia’s collection, Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, which question the value of what Petraglia terms GWSI (General Writing Skills Instruction). However, an important benefit of a cross curricular model, one that receives little attention in writing across the curriculum scholarship, is that linked courses not only help students improve as writers, but they can also enable students to understand that “when people learn, they don’t take on new knowledge so much as a new identity” (Lindquist ). Identity is closely linked with writing, but WAC tends to focus primarily on the actual writing, not on the role writers play in a discourse community. In this essay, we discuss a successful linkage between a writing class and a class in Health Sciences that used rhetoric, with particular emphasis on the concepts of identity, genre, and performance, to help students gain insight into the role of writing in the field of Public Health and understand what it means to be a Public Health professional. Differences in students’ responses to essays written at the beginning of the semester as

Graduate students often feel anxious about whether their writing is as it should be—and if not, why not? (How should it be? And how can they tell, other than by pleasing or displeasing their supervisors?) At the same time, some wish to be more creative, but not to risk the success of their academic “audition.” This article discusses a WAC-like seminar that, drawing on genre studies, helps to mediate these concerns for graduate students in an Australian university. They are introduced to genre analysis and encouraged to find patterns of structure, style, or strategy in theses in their area. At the same time, they look at examples that suggest a range of possibilities for creativity. The seminar demonstrates how the “interpersonal” work of a thesis can be achieved both by adhering to convention and by diverging from it.