As a teacher you are presented with a lot of terrible writing. One way to respond to such writing is to treat the student as lazy and incompetent, telling them to go back and “try harder.” Sometimes this is the right approach. It can be obvious that not much work was put into something. But what you want to avoid – at all costs – is using this approach with a student who genuinely tried hard but simply lacked the skills necessary to make their point clear. In that case it is you, the teacher, who has failed the student. In such situations (which I think are actually far more common than the first scenario) you need to do a “generous reading” of the text.
That means to start with the assumption that the student has something genuinely interesting to say but simply doesn’t know how to say it. Your responsibility is to excavate whatever that seed of insight might be and give them the tools necessary to allow it to grow. I would not be where I am now if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have benefited from numerous teachers who read my work in such a way and helped me learn to express myself. I’ve accumulated a lifetime of karmic debt that I will never be able to fully pay back. I try my best to remember this every time I read student work.
(The same thing can be said of peer review.)
source 傅可恩