If rhetoric is the art of speaking well, then presumably formalised rhetoric should recognise what it is to speak badly. In other words, for any taxonomy of the virtues of style there must be, either formally or by implication, a parallel taxonomy of the vices of style. These vices are the subject of the present chapter, first in terms of their taxonomy, and then in their literary application.

What is the merit of studying the vices of style? The first answer turns on the correlation between, on the one hand, the relation between bad and good rhetoric, and on the other, the relation between good rhetoric and ‘common’ discourse. For if the vices of style represent deviations from licit rhetoric, might this return us to the prior problem that rhetoric is itself a deviation from common speech? As George Puttenham confessed in his Arte of English Poesie (1589): ‘As figures be the instruments of ornament in every language, so be they also in a sorte abuses or rather trespasses in speech, because they passe the ordinary limits of common utterance.’