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Steve jobs commencement address at stanford university essay
Steve jobs commencement address at stanford university essay
Steve jobs commencement address at stanford university essay
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In our English 12 class, we have to do a rhetorical analysis of the Steve Jobs commencement speech that he delivered to the Stanford Graduating students of class 2005. In this analysis essay, we have to look for the strategies that the author used in his text to make his audience understand his claim that he made in his speech. Moreover, we did the SOAPSTone and the close read of the article to have a better understanding of the text. Consequently, we look for the ethos, pathos, logos, and literary devices that the author used to prove his point. I learned a lot through this assignment.
In Steve Jobs’ famous Commencement Address, he inspires the graduating students of Stanford University by telling his life story as a way to empower them to follow their dreams. This brilliant man that everyone aspires to be never graduated college. Although what Jobs says in his address is motivating and captures life experiences, I believe this speech is not appropriate for this particular audience. How is dropping out of college a good thing? Steve Jobs said “After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it”, but six months really isn’t enough time to have it all figured out.
He decided to look at it from another perspective—that being fired isn't the end of the world. Jobs said, "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could ever happen to me." In the next five years, he created a company named NeXT and Pixar, where he met
Jobs also uses imagery to show his credibility. In his speech he explains, “Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.” He shows the audience exactly how he had started, explaining from the beginning in college, to eventually creating his own company. He sets the scene by saying that he was only twenty years old, working in his garage.
Jobs built NeXT and Pixar, and later, Apple bought NeXT, and he was back on the team. He believes “none of this would have happened without being fired from Apple” (Jobs 2). Ultimately, when Jobs perceived this and kept moving forward, he returned to what he loved doing and never gave up. Finally, Jobs used a handful of metaphors during his speech in 2005. One example is, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.
Jobs’ portrayed a concrete diction through the phrase “I was lucky, I found what I loved to do so early in life” (Jobs, 2005, Pg. 2). This phrase helped the language of the text reflect back to Jobs’ purpose of the commencement speech. Jobs’ later got fired from Apple Corporations,“I felt that I had let the previous generations of entrepreneurs down- that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me” (Jobs, 2005, Pg.2). Jobs’ enlightened tone slowly declined into a calm, gloomy mood which portrayed that not everything in life came easy to Jobs and success was earned through hard work and devotion. Jobs’ purpose in this second story was to illustrate the difficult times he had, however through determination and hard work he was able to overcome them and do what he
Watching “Steve Jobs talks about managing people” made me realize why Apple quickly grew into such a successful company. Steve Jobs began the interview by disclosing that Apple is organized like a startup company. He then explained that work is divided into teams, such as Mac hardware, iPhone hardware engineering, operators, and world wild marketing. One might think that this just separates the company, however, Jobs went on to explain that all the teams meet for three hours a week and discuss the business as a whole. I think this method is highly effective because it allows for smaller groups, which in turn causes more focus and execution of ideas.
Great Storytelling Lu Jia Delivered on a campus in California to an audience of a few thousands, yet it ended up inspiring tens of millions from both U.S. and worldwide; worshiped by Silicon Valley as the ultimate career talk, yet it embodied many aspects of life - chance, love, loss, and ultimately death. Short but smart, targeted yet universal, poignant and timeless – thus is Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford. Some attribute its success to Jobs’ personal influence and charisma – they do add significant weight to the speech, undeniably. But close inspections from the lenses of rhetorical analysis allow us to appreciate this speech from a different perspective – in particular, how the speech was crafted into a fitting response to its rhetorical situation and how Jobs managed to strike a chord with his audience through the masterful use of logos, pathos and ethos, whether planned or not.
Hey, would you like to learn about Steve Jobs that you probably haven’t learned. Well, now I will tell about on why he left the maker of Star Wars for mainly one reason. Also, I will be telling how Steve Jobs created apple and found it through his experiences. Also why he denied Pixar after they asked him to join them. The first reason will be how exactly he denied Pixar.
The Steve Jobs commencement speech was a speech that was given by the former Apple Inc. CEO to Stanford University during the 114th commencement on 12th June 2005. The speech Steve Jobs gave Stanford University is a very effective speech, because of his use of rhetorical devices. Jobs especially use his background and childhood to play upon his rhetorical approach. In Steve Jobs, he tells several stories about love, detection, death, loss. The main part of the Speech is how Steve Jobs encourages the students to pursue their dreams, and do what makes them happy, even if it all doesn’t go after the plan.
Co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc, Steve Jobs, in his commencement speech at stanford university, illustrates three distinguishable points of his life. Jobs’ is very successful in his approach to inspire the graduates by speaking on the experience and insight he has gained. Jobs has a simplistic yet elegant tone and diction to convey his hardships to communicate how much life has to give and teach us in an inspirational way. Jobs begins his speech by dethroning himself as the well-known self made billionaire to create a connection to the graduates. He starts by putting the audience on a higher plateau with “I am honored to be with you”(1) and “ this is the closest I have been to a college graduation”(2) and when speaking of himself and his speech, he states it is “No big deal”.
He explains how he started Apple in his parents’ garage and how he meets a beautiful woman who would then become his wife. In a turn of events, he tells of how he gets fired from Apple, his own company, and how bad it feels. This again is another representation of Jobs’ failure. His main point is to explain why it is important to handle losses in a positive way. Jobs had not given up after getting fired because he loved what he did.
Jobs outlines exactly what his speech is about by explaining in the first paragraph that he would be telling three stories that pertain to his life. By choosing to share three different stories about connecting the dots, love and loss, and death, it made him speak in a conversational style, making the audience more comfortable. When an audience is engaged, it is much easier to connect with the speaker. Jobs’ also decided to use humor within his words and phrases to engage the audience. He states “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces...and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”(Jobs)
In life, there is always going to be something that one needs to learn; things such as yourself, other people, or the environment around you, pretty much the of do’s and don’t of life. During your journey, you are the ultimate ruler of what happens and what does not happen, but along the way, people will try to guide you and give you the best advice that they can. This is what Steve Jobs did during his commencement speech; he took what he knew life had taught him and tried to teach others about the best life one can live. After listening to the full commencement speech, one can see that Jobs wants us to live our life the way we would like to, and to make sure it’s lived to the fullest. During his speech, Jobs made an emphasis on three big ideas: You can’t connect the dots looking
Jobs was fired from Apple back in 1985 because the board believed he was no longer useful to the company, in fact, they believed he was being detrimental to the business, he says “our visions of the future began to diverge and… our Board of Directors sided with him.” Jobs chose to talk about how he was fired from Apple, the company he had founded, because it reveals Job’s biggest failure, He had spent most of his adult life growing the company, only to have it taken away, yet Jobs pushed on and recovered it later on. This use of pathos strengthens the connection with his audience, and shows how someone so successful once reached rock bottom, yet managed to climb his way back up, and it inspires them to be like
