In our information age, written communication has become increasingly important in many professions. As a result, university faculty and administrators need to develop specific curricula and pedagogies that will facilitate the process of equipping students with the required writing knowledge and skills to meet the demands of their workplace environments. In this article, we argue that Writing Across the Professions (WAP) as a curricular model meets that requirement, particularly in Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) contexts, which we believe are conducive to fostering writing transfer in university students. WAP foregrounds the importance of writing in workplace contexts and aims to facilitate the transfer of students’ knowledge and practices by focusing on rhetorical genre theory and analysis, discourse community theory and analysis, providing engaged feedback on students’ writing, and inviting students to critically reflect on their previous and current writing knowledge and practices. In this article, we propose four conceptual foundations that university faculty and administrators can utilize to implement WAP programs at their institutions. The first concept is that professional (writing) knowledge and practices are contextual and require lifelong learning; WIL faculty and students thus need to be informed about what is involved in learning to write across professions. Secondly, as the transfer of professional (writing) knowledge and practices goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, both faculty and students need to build contextual awareness. Thirdly, as problem-solving is an integral part of writing in the professions, faculty and students need to engage in critical reflection. Finally, professional (writing) knowledge and practices impact identities and therefore require mentoring. In outlining these shared concepts from WIL and writing transfer research, this article offers examples of how they can inform curricular approaches and pedagogical practices in WAP.

The recent focus on threshold concepts in writing studies indicates the field’s growing commitment to engaging writing-based threshold concepts in the daily work of teaching and learning to facilitate writing transfer. However, although there is growing evidence of robust scholarly work in this area, research on the pedagogical importance of these concepts to the writing development and tutoring of L2 students is still in its nascent stages. To address this gap, this paper first presents findings from a research study that aims to understand how writing centre tutors addressed the needs of L2 students in tutoring sessions and the extent to which threshold-oriented language appeared in the content of the conference summaries. After discussing the findings, the paper proposes a threshold concept-based framework for tutoring L2 writers involving two established concepts: ‘writers’ histories, processes, and identities vary’ and ‘writing is informed by prior experiences.’ In addition, a new model of the conference summary as a reflective tool to promote writing transfer is presented along with a discussion of emergent writing centre-oriented concepts that reimagine the role of the tutor as an ‘expert-outsider’ and the L2 student as ‘informed novice.’