you certainly don't need that advice!
Well, you would be surprised at how helpful a simple recipe like that can be, even for people who are experienced writers. An essay with good structure is a series of well-articulated ideas. If someone deeply understands that, it really helps them interact with their readings and writings.
So, I think it is useful even though you intended it for another thread, ha ha... it's how we break an essay down into the ideas, the individual ideas.
In this case, the student is struggling to come up with an answer to complex questions; it is especially important to identify key ideas, like "likeness of effects" in the topic sentence of one of the questions. Those questions need to be broken down into their component ideas.
Then, you need to break down the reading in the same way. It's tedious, but maybe you will love it!