What's important is that you establish a CLEAN bevel. How you accomplish that is really irrelevant. If I've got one that needs lots of work, like an old, blunt, wedge or one that needs a complete bevel restoration due to chips, damage or extreme dullness, I'll use a circular motion doing one side at a time and keeping the razor on the hone. There's no need to baby an edge that needs a lot of work. That's like using a weedeater to mow your lawn.

A clean bevel, as I think of it, is one where the bevel is the same width on both sides of the blade and the scratch patterns are completely clean to the very edge of the blade on both sides and all the way up and down the edge. This can sometimes be hard to see with the naked eye, especially with fine grit hones. I usually use anywhere from 360 to 600 grit diamond hones to do this. That sure sounds like very, very coarse grit, but it works extremely well if you don't want to make a weekend project out of honing your razor - and the scratch patterns get straightened right up as you start going to finer grits one the bevel is established. As soon as the bevel is clean like that, it's been restored and more work on the large grit hones will only wear your razor unnecessarily.

Razors that have a farily clean bevel but aren't very sharp I start off with a 1200 grit hone, usually. It takes a little experience to determine just how much hone you'll need for each blade's condition. Some can be set straight away in little time with a 4000 grit. It all depends on their condition. Ideally, for minimum edge wear, you want to use the finest grit you can use to hone the razor without turning it into a honing marathon.

Most razors can be restored from butterknife dull to shaving sharp within about 20 minutes if you use right progression of hones. It's a waste of time to use one too fine and it's a waste of steel to use one that's too coarse.