Dale Grauman is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at Iowa State. He studies writing and the teaching of writing. A while back, he speculated that his students would value their compulsory writing classes more if their assignments gave them more opportunities to explore how they would use writing in their college majors or in their future careers. Now he’s working on a research project to test that assumption. He is also developing a project in which he would collaborate with professors in other disciplines to assess the transfer of writing knowledge from first-year composition into other university writing contexts.