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At a certain level of description everyone's language processes are the same. At another level of description everyone's language processes are different. A major task for applied cognitive scientists is to find levels of description that capture educationally significant differences. In the emerging field of research on composing processes, the search for appropriate descriptions has been carried out largely through the comparison of expert and novice writers (Burtis, Bereiter, Scardamalia, & Tetroe, 1983; Flower & Hayes, 1980; Scardamalia & Paris, 1985). Models of the composing process, however, have been aimed at universality, that is, at providing a description applicable to writers at all levels of skill (de Beaugrande, 1984; Hayes & Flower, 1980a). This has created a gap between theory and data. Empirical research has produced a wealth of data on differences between what experts and novices do when they write, but the available models have been too general to be very helpful in bringing order out of this mass of observations. In this chapter we set forth two models of composing processes, one intended to capture essential features of immature composing and the other features that distinguish mature writers. We use the terms mature and immature, rather than expert and novice, because the reference groups for these models are advanced undergraduates and graduate students, on one hand, and elementary school students, on the other. Thus, the" mature" reference group includes many who are by no means experts in the use of the written word, and the “immature" group includes some who are very skillful in the kinds of writing they do …