Managing to communicate one's thoughts and ideas coherently and fluently remains a challenging task for native and non-native student writers alike. This challenge corresponds to the very nature of the writing act, which calls upon multiple and sophisticated cognitive operations. The major aim of this study was to investigate the writing strategies and attitudes of a cohort of Tunisian first year Arts students and composition teachers and detect areas of mismatch between the learning preferences of the students and the teaching practices of the instructors. The study was carried out via a writing strategies questionnaire for teachers and another questionnaire for students. Most of the items included in the two questionnaires were based on Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory of Language Learning (SILL) with some modifications to address writing skills and specific Tunisian context. The present research produced a number of key findings. Respondents seemed to favor certain strategies over others. For instance, most of the students reported that they were predisposed to strategies such as re-reading, asking the teacher for help, using bilingual dictionaries, collecting and organizing information frequently as opposed to cooperating with others, referring back to feedback from one's previous writing, and editing at the level of content and organization. As for teachers, the majority claimed that they often drew their students' attention to the use of new strategies, encouraged peer-to-peer discussion, and advised them to look for samples of essays to follow. A large number of participants seemed to underscore the importance of several key writing strategies like engaging students in planning, organizing, and reviewing their essays and intervening during the writing process. The results reached could be used as tools by teachers to diagnose and analyze students' needs and to raise learners' awareness of using particular writing strategies. Appended are: (1) Questionnaire for students; and (2) Questionnaire for teachers. (Contains 13 tables and 17 figures.)