This verse sits inside the aside on scoffers and the wise, Proverbs 9:7–12.
Quick answer
Wisdom compounds. The person who already has some is the person most able to take on more, which is encouraging and slightly unfair.
Read the whole unit
Six verses sit between the two banquets, and they are not obviously about either one. They are about who can be taught. Correct a scoffer and you collect insults; correct a wise man and he loves you for it. Give instruction to the wise and he gets wiser. Then the book's motto returns, and the section closes with a line about bearing your own outcome.
On the placement. Interpreters have long noticed that these verses interrupt the two-banquet structure, and some treat them as displaced or inserted. This catalog treats them as their own unit standing where they stand, and reading them in place, they do real work: between two invitations that sound identical, the book pauses to talk about what makes a person able to hear at all. The question the banquets pose is which voice you answer. The question this section poses is whether you are someone who can still be told anything.
On verses 7 and 8, which get misused. "Do not correct a scoffer" is not permission to avoid criticism, and it is not a label to hang on someone whose challenge you would rather not answer. The scoffer in this book is defined by a settled posture of contempt toward correction itself, not by disagreeing with you. Using this verse to dismiss a person is the single most common misreading, and it is self-serving in an obvious way, because the one thing a scoffer would most like is a verse that ends the conversation. Read honestly, verse 8's real force is in its second half: rebuke a wise man and he will love you. The test the section proposes is not whether you can identify scoffers. It is how you take being told you are wrong.
On verse 10. The book's motto returns here in a second form, and it closes Collection I where 1:7 opened it. What the fear of the LORD actually means is defined by the book itself at 8:13, and it is not dread: it is hating what is evil, an aversion to what harms rather than terror of God.
What this verse contributes
This verse states the positive half of the section's principle and describes an accumulating return. What a wise man does with instruction is get wiser, which means the gap between him and the scoffer widens over time without either of them doing anything new. That is simply an observation about how learning works, and the book states it without moralizing. It is also quietly hopeful, since the barrier it identifies is not intelligence or background but willingness, and willingness is the one thing the simple person of verse 4 has not yet ruled out.
Related: Proverbs 1:5 · Proverbs 9:4 · Matthew 13:12
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.