To fully understand an argument, experienced readers ask big-picture questions about the author, the audience they address, the context, the genre of the text, the purpose of the text, and the constraints that shape how it is written.

Such an argument analysis, also called a rhetorical analysis, asks you to describe what the other writer is up to, not just in terms of ideas but in terms of all the strategies they used to make the argument convincing. You become a kind of detective, piecing together the moves the writer made, the reasons for them, and their likely effects on readers.