Workshopping

Inspired by Mr. Tallman's noticing that we tend to avoid writing about writing, I have decided to write about my general experience with work shopping essays in class.
And it's not exactly positive. I generally find advice given by other students (and I'm sure this applies to the advice I ggive as well) to be not all that helpful in improving my writing beyond what I have put out.
Let me explain exactly what I mean by that. Generally, a student's advice will not go beyond basic word choice or syntax. Very rarely will you hear a student advise another student to completely rework his essay this way or that in order to effectively transmit his point. I think the reason for this is threefold.
One, most kids our age would probably be uncomfortable giving that kind of heavy-handed criticism to another student. As we view each other generally as equals, telling a fellow student that his essay basically sucks sounds really arrogant and just feels like you're being a dick.
The second reason is that students are generally not confident enough in their own writing ability to be able to offer up serious criticism. Especially when editing writing by the likes of Matt Luongo, I feel as though any criticism I could possibly offer is going to be less sophisticated than the actual writing he has already put down.
Finally, conversations about the writing tend to get sidetracked. In the workshop between Brendan, John and I in our most recent class, we ended up arguing about the subject of my writing (straight plays versus musical theater) for half an hour instead of working on our writing.
All of this being said, it is a pretty good way to get someone to scan your writing for any basic mistakes so I suppose it is worth it in that way.