Steve Jobs Rhetorical Devices

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. Steve gives us this information to be more relatable to people; not everyone goes to college, and he shows we can succeed without it. To begin, Jobs used repetition during his

Jobs intended to make a point to his audience that they should always do what they love and what makes them happy, even if things do not always go as planned. Job continuously repeated how he did not graduate college and how he “dropped out of Reed College after the first six months” (Jobs 1). He is repetitive with this to be relatable to the graduates and his audience and show that anyone, no matter the circumstances or educational background, can succeed like him. Furthermore, Jobs also tells a few of his stories to his audience. As stated before, he tells the graduates the story of why he dropped out of college: “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire lives. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay” (Jobs 1). He begins telling his stories to prepare the audience for things to happen in their lives, but to keep moving forward. Another story Jobs tells his audience is about love and loss. He found something he loved: “Luckily, I found what I loved to do early in my life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20” (Jobs

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. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future” (Jobs 1). Jobs mentioned this while discussing how he couldn’t connect the dots during college. He did not understand what he was doing with his life moving forward. “But looking back ten years” (Jobs 1), he stated, he could see why. He believed he wouldn’t be where he is today without dropping out of college. Later in the speech, Jobs made another statement to point out again not to lose faith after setbacks: “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it” (Jobs