Topic > Analysis of Rhetorical Techniques in Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speech

Steve Jobs, one of the best-known business leaders and the brains behind most of the technology we use today, was invited to Stanford's graduation ceremony Stanford University. For many who don't recognize him, he was the CEO and co-founder of Pixar, NeXT, and Apple. Steve Jobs not only invented the best phones in the world, but also thinks differently from other people. Unfortunately he died of pancreatic cancer. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs gave the speech “How to Live Before You Die” to inspire and encourage students to chase their dream with no one coming close. Using three different stories, it turns back the clock, indicating how hard life can be and how to turn setbacks into motivation. Unlike any other speaker, Steve Jobs masterfully applies many rhetorical devices including visual simplicity, lawyering, and tons of rhetorical techniques. Throughout the speech, he successfully uses logos, ethos, and pathos to encourage students to follow their hearts and continue to strive for what they love to do. Steve Jobs knows that the audience he's speaking to is a group of talented, exploratory students, and most of them are still eager to find out what's best for them. As a result, Jobs mentioned several stories about his ups and downs and how he managed to surpass others by believing in himself. At that point, everyone thinks about the failures and disappointments of their lives, hoping not to make mistakes in the future. Yet Steve Jobs not only supports his audience with strong words, but actually brings the entire unit together and shows them that they always look up and have faith, no matter how tough life may be. At the beginning of the speech, Steve Jobs begins with the phrase “I am honored to be with you today at your graduation from one of the best universities in the world” (Jobs). He then states, “I never graduated from college. In fact, this is the closest thing to a college degree I've ever had” (Jobs). From these two sentences we can see that Steve Jobs is trying to use pathos as a way to show his modesty. Therefore, this makes him and the audience feel connected for the rest of the speech. In fact, Jobs is also trying to convince his audience to follow their passion even if things don't go as planned. After the introduction, Steve Jobs began to tell the three stories of his life. Each of them consists of simple and concise statements. The purpose is to allow the audience to more easily understand and grasp the main focus of the story. In these circumstances, Jobs uses triads effectively in many of his sentences. In fact, the idea was characterized when he says, “My biological mother was a young, unmarried graduate student and she decided to give me up for adoption.” We can see that Jobs is already talking about his devastating childhood. The first story Steve Jobs calls “Connecting the Dots” explains the adoption process he went through when he was younger. Steve Jobs explains how his biological mother wants him to be adopted by college-educated parents. He relentlessly convinced his mother that he would indeed attend college and graduate. However, he decided to drop out and take a calligraphy class which helped him incorporate the first Mac he ever made. After explaining his life from decline to success, he returns to humor by stating, “If I had never taken that one course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows has.