Rhetorical Analysis Of Steve Jobs College Commencement Speech

College commencement speeches are usually a glistening review of the college from an alumni who accredits their success to their school education but Steve Jobs addresses the graduates of Stanford college slightly differently. He shared his successes of his career but did not attribute them to his college equation but almost the opposite. He is known as one of the largest inventors in the tech industry and in the personal computer era and he shares how achieved this massive amount of success. Throughout the duration of his speech freshly graduated college students unpack his personal story and decipher how it applies to them in this stage of their life. While the members in the audience had just graduated college, Jobs had just released the

In the first story, Jobs explains how taking an expected side-step in his journey led him to find his true passion in life and rediscover his joy for learning. He captions his first story as “connecting the dots”. Jobs uses a tactic of providing a hook that draws the listener in while also lying about what is to come throughout the speech. The first story's hook is that Jobs dropped out of college after only 6 months. He begins his first story at the true beginning, his birth. He explains that his biological mother “felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates” but this plan quickly takes a turn when he becomes adopted by a couple who had neither graduated from college or high school. This is the first of many unexpected changes that occur throughout his future. He explains that he eventually completed his mother's goal of attending college but once he arrived at Reed College he “couldn’t see the value in it”. He uses pathos by connecting with the audience's emotions knowing

This story revolves around a singular quote that Jobs had decided to live by, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” He uses logos or logic to explain that death is the fate that everyone will eventually face and advises the students in the audience to make sure that they feel passionate about what they are doing each and every day. He compares death to an important tool to help make big decisions in life, in his scenario this encounter with death was when he got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was given a 3 to 6 month countdown on life and he realized that he needed to begin cherishing every moment. He uses ethos to play on students' emotions and make them realize that they never know what day could be their last and that they should truly pursue their dreams. He soon learns that he has been gifted a rare second chance at life when his cancer is cured with a life-saving surgery. Although he is free from the timer on his time left he continues to hold with him the lessons he learned from his near death experience. He brings the story to a close by repeating his mantra of his speech “follow your heart and intuition”, he advises the audience to follow their own path in life and not get trapped “living with the results of other people’s thinking”. He leaves the audience with a