Make offer to disheartened novice on ship showing gentle consideration (10)
I believe the answer is:
tenderness
'gentle consideration' is the definition.
The definition and answer can be both human attributes as well as being singular nouns.
Maybe you can see a link between them that I don't see?
'make offer to disheartened novice on ship' is the wordplay.
'make offer' becomes 'tender' (I can't justify this - if you can you should believe this answer much more).
'to disheartened' says to hollow out the word (remove centre letters) (the middle or heart is removed).
'on' says to put letters next to each other (in a down clue, letters appear on others).
'ship' becomes 'SS' (prefix in ship names eg SS Great Britain).
'novice' with its centre removed is 'ne'.
'tender'+'ne'+'ss'='TENDERNESS'
'showing' acts as a link.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for tenderness that I've seen before include "Heart" , "sore?" , "Gentle quality" , "Compassion" , "Gentleness, sensitivity" .)