This article illustrates the sometimes unproductive tensions between community engagement goals in teaching writing and academic trends and institutional structures that influence grading practices and the language of authorship. To broaden instructors' understandings of possibilities for the relatively peaceful coexistence of individual and collaborative authorship and the always-existing pull between them, it offers an overview of authorship history. In addition, it offers directions for a productive writing and community engagement pedagogy in the form of classroom community building, assignment design, and grading practices, all of which are informed by theories of genre and discourse communities. (Contains 9 notes.)