As more than one workshop member has said, the best way to get a good crit is to give a good one. First of all, we should say that writing is done with the heart as well as the head. Writing is necessarily a mixture of emotion and intellect. We don't want these ideas to become loaded, and we're not saying that one kind of writing or one kind of writer is better than another. We're just saying that writers come in all stripes, and good writing almost always contains a mixture of heart and head, intellect and emotion, reason and passion.
Emotional responses are important.
That being said, we belong to the school of thought that says that writing is deliberate and hard work. But writing is still hard work, and it should be. Since we think of writing as work, and as something deliberate, we think every word and sentence should have a purpose. And as readers, we should treat words and phrases as though they have a purpose. If you assume that the writer put words and phrases there on purpose, then the only way to do that piece of writing justice is to treat each word and phrase as though it were important.