The article is devoted to a multi-aspect study of the composition of a special type of text - rhetorical text. Polyaspectivity is a consequence of the complex communicative nature of the studied textotype. Initial theoretical and methodological principles have been determined, indicating the need to study the composition of the text in line with the emerging communicative approach. Particular attention is paid to the idea of transformations of meaning during the absorption of one compositional unit by another, as well as to the principle of multi-compositionality. The article successively examines aspects of the compositional organization of a rhetorical text: structural-semantic, argumentative, and formal-pragmatic. The structural and semantic aspect is associated with the study of selection and combination of communicative speech registers - the basic compositional units that provide meaning. The argumentative aspect explains the mechanisms for creating the persuasiveness of the rhetorical text. The concept of the argumentation complex is introduced that is the union of register units that perform certain functions in the argumentation. The formal-pragmatic aspect demonstrates the formation of the superstructure of the text by incorporating argumentative complexes into the main part of the rhetorical text, as well as its communicative-pragmatic framework - introduction and conclusion. The material for the analysis was texts qualifying as rhetorical and relating to various discursive practices: presentation-aesthetic, religious-educational, political, journalistic. The result of the study is a multi-aspect methodology, treating the compositional organization of the text as a chain of transformations of compositional units of different levels in the direction from sense to text.