Estudios de lingüística inglesa aplicada THE WRITING STRATEGIES OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: FOCUSING ON MEMORY, COMPENSATION, SOCIAL AND AFFECTIVE STRATEGIES Ana Belén Cabrejas Peñuelas Instituto Universitario de Lenguas Modernas Aplicadas (IULMA) Universidad de Valencia, Spain ana.belen.cabrejas@uv.es This study examines the self-reported strategy use of a group of 231 American students in their writing tasks. The Inventory of Learning Strategies questionnaire has been created and validated for this study, as well as a background questionnaire. The results indicate that proicient and less proicient writers use a wide variety of strategies; however, ex- pert writers favour the use of cognitive, metacognitive and compensation strategies, followed by affective, memory and social strategies. The esta- blished relationships between the frequencies of strategy use and grade in English by means of ANOVA show that writers who get the best grades use more strategies. Women also use more strategies than men in terms of both categories and individual strategies. Finally, the pattern of writing strategies used by writers may be illustrative of their learning style. Key words: Learning strategies, writing strategies, native wri- ters, strategy use, proicient writers, less proicient writers. ELIA 12, 2012, pp. 77-113