As an instructor of the developmental reading and writing course at Texas State University, Barrie McGee is required per state mandate to design a course as an accelerated version of an integrated reading and writing (IRW) course. Furthermore, she is uniquely positioned as a student enrolled in the program in developmental education to access literature on theory and research relevant to integrating reading and writing to help inform her instructional choices. For example, Bartholemae and Petrosky's (1986) seminal work, "Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts," has done much to help her envision what such a course would look like including, assignments and reflections on student writing and insights of the difficulty underprepared students have imagining themselves as readers and writers. However, it is Salvatori's (1996) difficulty paper assignment, the topic discussed in her article, "Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition," which resonates with McGee as paving a way for students to engage in conversation with the text and to prepare for class discussions by writing a one-page description of any difficulty they noted in a given reading. Drawing from Salvatori's (1996) article, McGee argues that the difficulty paper assignment provides a flexible framework for instruction in the IRW course that reflects the features of Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading and writing and which perceives what she terms "leaning into difficulty" as a way to build new knowledge. In this article, she begins broadly with a short discussion on the fundamentals of an IRW course according to Bartholemae and Petrosky (1986), and then moves into a more specific focus on Salvatori's (1996) rationale for and particulars of the difficulty paper assignment. McGee expands this view of the difficulty paper by examining its use in Sweeney and McBride's (2015) study to further highlight the flexibility of the assignment to gain insight into student experiences with reading. Final thoughts conclude the article.