Most higher education institutions lack a program that promotes students’ transfer—that is, reapplication or repurposing—of writing skills and knowledge across the curriculum, a phenomenon that research shows does not tend to happen without deliberate sustained support. This article introduces an online instrument, the Writer’s Individualized Transfer Tool, which the author invented to intervene in this area as a supplemental or provisional effort, using freeware to foster and research students’ writing transfer from first-year composition to other courses and potentially beyond. The article reviews relevant scholarship on transfer in writing, describes and illustrates Writer’s Individualized Transfer Tool’s design, provides instructions for the tool’s implementation and usage, reviews some results from a pilot study of an application of the tool in an first-year composition curriculum, and discusses related issues requiring further consideration.
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