The traditional basic writing model (giving students manageable writing tasks like narratives and descriptions of familiar places) has been criticized by both Mike Rose and David Bartholomae, among others, for not moving the basic writer far enough toward the goal of academic writing competence. Rose's schemata are reassuring and helpful to basic writers, but the assignments are remote from their immediate concerns. Bartholomae's use of personal experience as the basis on which to build generalizations and theories are more appealing to basic writers, but the assignments lack explicit procedures that can be followed as they perform the complex tasks required by writing in the academic world. Two assignments synthesize the approaches of Rose and Bartholomae. In the first assignment, students are asked to categorize papers they and their classmates have written about personal experiences and then to discuss a single category, comparing and contrasting the papers within it. The second assignment asks students to identify a problematic situation in a book, and form that problematic situation into a problem statement, which contains the clashing elements of the problem and a question whose answer will resolve the problem. Students then go on to investigate possible answers, using the text as evidence. (RS)