Looking through Metafilter profiles brought me to this posting by playwright Max Sparber:
"To me, workshops seem most useful for writers who have a good sense of their own strengths and weakness, and also have a good sense of what works and doesn't work on the page or the stage. It is important to be able to recognize when well-meaning advice is useless, and, as sometimes happens, when spiteful advice is actually useful. This is a hard enough task for an experienced writer, and I would wager it is almost impossible for a new writer."
He goes on to give some advice on getting the most out of playwriting workshops. Some of the advice is good, but I'll have to disagree with workshops not being that useful for beginning writers. The good thing about being a beginner in a writing workshop, regardless of the advice you're getting, is you'll be reading both good and bad work, and after reading enough, be able to tell the difference. If you're perceptive enough, you'll figure out how to avoid the mistakes you see in others' writing in what you do; and understand how to use some of the same useful devices your fellow writers use.
Two good links from Sparber's posting, anyway: (1) the Turkey City lexicon, a set of terms (some disparaging, some just descriptive) useful in critiquing science fiction stories; and (2) a critique of writing workshops from a New York Press writer, who's afraid that writing workshops - the ones associated with academic institutions, anyway - are homogenizing fiction and encouraging beginning writers to churn out bland stories. The jumping-off point for his tirade is the anthology Best New American Voices 2006:
"All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator's difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible: one story takes place on a road trip to a presidential birthplace, another while moving apartments, another at a wedding, another while opening presents in front of the Christmas tree. None of this much matters anyway, because the things the characters do are always mundane and largely incidental to their psychological conflicts... Finally, most of these stories end with a symbolic 'moment of clarity' in which nothing happens, but a change has been imperceptibly arrived at."
Ouch.