The manual consistently presents the evolution of the subject of Russian rhetoric as a doctrine of speech, describes the most important sections of science, systematizes and explains the terminology illustrating the origin of many concepts of modern philology and linguistics. The rhetorical representations of Ancient Russia received a complete description in the book, for the first time the content of handwritten rhetoric of the Peter's time was exhaustively shown, rare monuments of Russian philological thought of the 18th-19th centuries were analyzed.