📝 Proofreading and Editing vs. Tutoring: Thoughts

Very recently I was asked in an interview session what I thought the main difference between proofreading/editing and tutoring was. For a moment I was caught off guard—not because I didn't think there was one (I in fact think there is a significant difference) but because I had not ever been tasked with putting the difference into words. For me, it had always been an obvious difference, one that was embodied by the tutoring session itself: one is an in-person kind of deal, the other can be done from a distance, over time. But, due to the incredible changes that the world is currently facing, this gap is closed—tutoring is now done from a distance, and in some cases asynchronously just as editing would be done. So what exactly is the difference? Not the many differences, but the one and only thing that I can point to that can, in short, account for the difference between tutoring and editing?

Something we talk a lot about when becoming a tutor is the difference between higher order concerns and lower order concerns. Some people might call them HOC's and LOC's—I'm not among them! Higher order concerns are the bigger picture things: thesis statement, conclusion, argument, cohesion, clarity. Lower order concerns are the less important stuff to getting your point across: sentence structure, punctuation, spelling, grammar. Often when I was tutoring a student would come in asking about their grammar, their spelling, their punctuation, and I would have to steer the conversation in the direction of the more important, higher order concerns I had with their work. We often think about these lower order concerns as the obstacle to overcome, when in reality they are more of an afterthought in the writing process.

For me, at the very least, it seems simple: the difference then is that tutoring deals with the higher order concerns: making sure the student knows their larger argument, their thesis, their path to the conclusion, etc, while editing and proofreading, the afterthought, deals with the lower order concerns: the punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. This is not to say these concerns are not important, or that they don't come up while tutoring—because they are and they do—it's that they are the less important subject at hand for a tutor and their student to deal with. The goal should always be to improve the most important things first while you have the student in front of you, whether in-person or via a video call, and save the editing and proofreading for later.