This article describes partial results found within doctoral research entitled: Social practices and representations in university academic writing. The overall objective of the work aimed to identify and analyze social representations manifested by teachers and students about academic writing and its relation to student writing practices. One of the specific objectives, which is accounted for in this article, was to describe and analyze writing activities and assignmentsperformed by students in university classrooms. The theoretical framework is based, first, on the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1984; Jodelet, 1984, 2008, and Abric, 2001), and second, in the theoretical and didactic principles of academic writing, that is, Chevallard’s systemic triadic: teacherstudent- content (2005), and for some aspects of the teaching action (Brousseau, 1998; Rickemnann, 2009; Camps, 2001; Castello, 2011, and Lerner, 2001),among others. The methodology follows a hermeneutically-based qualitativeethnographic  approach. The results showed academic writing activities obey to systematic patterns of behavior, such as: reading, asking questions, answering (RQA). As these are step-by-step highly ritualized activities, they are easily predictable by students.