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 his speech, he talked about his upbringing and how he got to where he is. He started with a rougher childhood and many other fearful moments in his lifetime. Steve Jobs fulfilled the theme of fear better than Lorraine Hansberry. This is because the style in which he wrote his speech connected the theme with the audience
In the excerpt, Steve Jobs explains that we will all come to an end one day and it would be foolish to not go out and chase your dreams and make things happen for yourself. Using Steve Jobs as an example, he created one of the most used products worldwide; Apple Products. His breakthrough designs and software changed the game for social media and staying connected to our world. I agree with Jobs when he says that we should do everything in our power to work to make our own type of history within our lives before we die, it is important that we know our value and never sell ourselves short. There is one thing no one is able to escape, and that is death.
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 his wisely crafted and remarkably creative speech given to Stanford graduates in 2005, Steve Jobs distinctly relates and emotionally persuades his audience through repetition and imagery to enforce the idea of following your dreams. Jobs uses his personal experiences throughout his life by using emotion to convey to his audience the importance of living a life you’re proud of. He also develops his credibility through the use of imagery and repetition. Steve Jobs has lived a difficult life, experiencing many hardships and misfortunes throughout his time. He uses these experiences to display emotion and teach his audience a valuable life lesson.
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”.
Steve Jobs has dramatically impacted the world and today’s generations. He is the reason we have the advanced phones we have today. In Jobs’ speech, he uses many rhetorical devices to inform us, such as repetition, stories, and humor, to provide powerful context and inform the audience that he goes through some of the same things we do, struggles and pain, but also love and happiness. In addition, Jobs gave some background on himself during his speech. He began by saying that he had never graduated from college and had dropped out after the first six months of college.
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
Commencement Speech Analysis Steve Jobs is one of the US’s most successful entrepreneurs and inventors. He was the CEO and creator of three different billion-dollar companies being, Apple, Pixar and NeXT, throughout his life. He is known for being the inventor of the most influential portable computer, the Macintosh laptop. Jobs was giving his speech to the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford University. Many speakers at graduations are successful Alum from the school they are speaking at Steve Jobs did not graduate from Stanford.
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.
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.
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.
So he started NeXT and Pixar, also multi-million dollar companies. These business’s would then merge with Apple. He then went on to get married and start a happy family. The point behind this story is to make the graduating students understand that doing what they love is the best thing they can do. His passion for innovation and entrepreneurship caused him to build from his losses and start two successful new companies.
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
In the speech “Steve Jobs Commencement Address to Stanford University, Class of 2005” , Apple CEO Steve Jobs provides his audience with personal experiences and the rough periods he went through in his early years before founding apple that helped him succeed. With the use of his stories Jobs creates a character that prevails through obstacles and manages to achieve his goals, which inspires his audience to look up to him and show that failure is sometimes necessary to succeed. At the beginning of his speech, Steve Jobs begins describing his life with a series of stories that helped him reach his success, this helps Jobs create ethos because his audience will understand the hardships he went through to be where he is today, instead of just thinking of Jobs as the founder of Apple and not really knowing about the struggles he had to go through.
