To describe and analyze the revision processes of a group of college freshmen and a group of experienced adult writers, eight freshman students and seven experienced adult writers were asked to write three compositions, rewrite each composition two times, suggest revisions for a composition written by an anonymous author, and be interviewed three times. The students wrote their compositions in a class as a regular class activity while the adults wrote their compositions in their own homes or in their offices. Writing tasks consisted of expressive, explanatory, and persuasive writing. Findings show that the student writers have operational procedures for revising and reasons to explain their procedures, but that they have not codified or synthesized the procedures into a theory of the revision process. The experienced writers, on the other hand, have a codified set of principles about how their revision process works. For the experienced writers revision was not a stage but rather a process that occurred throughout their writing. Their first drafts were already the results of an elaborate revision process in which their revision theories operated to reject some ideas and to select others. Thus, the evidence from this study calls for a rejection of the linear stage theory since that theory does not describe the behavior of experienced writers. An alternate theoretical model is the concept of dissonance in which the writers sense dissonance, tolerate dissonance, and resolve dissonance, thereby reflecting the recursive process of revision. (HOD)