Rhetoric, in this course, is the art of finding and ordering the available means of persuasion in speech — ordered to what is true and good, not to winning at any cost. It does not wait until “language is fixed.” It is itself a care of language, practiced for these hearers, in this case.
It still presupposes grammar and logic. A speaker who cannot form a statement or follow an inference has nothing yet to offer a hearer except heat. Training the tongue is not a later polish on a self that is already complete. It is how a self becomes able to mean something in public.
If empty debate is already your trouble — talking well enough to occupy the floor, without being able to mean a claim — the later pages will allow a look at rhetoric sooner than the default order. That is not because voice is first. It is because you already have fluency without the arts that would make fluency responsible. Even then you will be sent back. The foundation is the same: words first, because teaching and learning are already linguistic.
The next pages begin from ordinary experiences of being misunderstood and of making a promise. If you came here for a voice, keep the need. This course will not trade it for mere correctness. It will ask you to make the need into speech.
Continue to Why we begin with words.