Rhetorical Devices used in Steve Jobs' Speech

Apple’s former CEO, Steve Jobs, in his speech, narrates his personal experience about success and failure. His purpose is to tell the new generation to do what they truly want to do. The audience of his speech is the students of Stanford University. Here, he adopts a sincere and sentimental tone in order to convince the new generation of the importance of doing what they want to do. This speech, which is entitled “Jobs summed up his life”, focuses on encourage new generation to do what their want to do. Jobs use make up his speech, The first story is about connecting the dots. The second story is about love and loss. The last one is about death.jobs use three stories, connect his study experience，form drop his school work and then join

As Jobs says,“I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?” Jobs employs the questions to catch people’s attention and arose their curiosity. Besides, after six months, I couldn 't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out, here, jobs gives details of why he dropped out of school, vividly describes his helplessness and make groundwork for narrating the reasons of his success. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick”jobs uses Personification, this ways make abstract things more concrete, and it is vividly shows that life will encounter many setbacks, like a person hits you head with a brick ,we even can feel the pain from these word . As Jobs says, “Again, you can 't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. ”Here, Jobs emphasizes the conclusion he made during his life by the use of “again”. Moreover, he elaborates and enumerates what people have to trust by listing the important elements of

Overall, this speech is much loaded with wonderful rhetorical techniques. He uses metaphor, personification, and application many details writing and so on. It is make his speech more abundant. He also uses ethos, pathos ,logos make the speech more vividly. Jobs talk about background about his life, success and failure, his unique ideas about life and gives sincere suggestion to students about the success. I believe that this successful and outstanding speech must provoke people’s introspection about themselves and may help guide the way for