Despite the importance of academic writing skills in higher education, many Indonesian students encounter challenges that constrain their writing success. Earlier studies in the context have shown that many students have little control over the schematic structure of the argumentative text and their linguistics features. In the current paper, we aimed to document a classroom practice where direct and indirect supports were given to the students during the course of academic writing at an English Education program in a private university in Jakarta, Indonesia. From our reflection on the practice, students benefited from the two supports given to them in each stage of a writing activity. Students were shown to have sufficient knowledge about the academic literature, how to search journal articles, and how to comprehend and annotate the articles' contents. Despite the students' positive feedback, we found that the average students' writings were not satisfactory. While students had sufficient knowledge to select and use appropriate academic words, there appeared substantial issues concerning the development of ideas and arguments to support the idea. We observed that students had limited time to practice, and this inhibited them from producing a good academic essay. The academic writing course syllabus and its timetable thus should be revisited to address such issues.