As writing pedagogy gains distinct footholds in university classrooms in India, it is worth retracing some of its steps to the shaping influence of composition pedagogies in the United States. In this article, the authors recount their experiences of using the concept of conversation to enable academic writing in their classrooms. Each narrative details adaptations of what did not automatically transfer to their particular contexts. These adaptations highlight a range of cross-cultural assumptions -- from misaligned cultural references to the levels of prior reading and writing skills -- that can be taken for granted. Overall, the work has required many more intermediate steps to make writing pedagogy workable in their socially and linguistically diverse classrooms. The authors learned that what seems matter-of-fact in American composition -- the analogy of conversation as talk or strategy for analytic writing -- has to be made accessible in their classrooms as something of their own.