Steve Jobs Rhetorical Devices

Steve Jobs turned out to be very successful even though he wasn’t a college graduate. Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement speech is considered to be very effective and moving, because of his use of his rhetorical devices. Steve Jobs shares three stories of his past to play upon his rhetorical strategies. While speaking to the Stanford graduates who are ready to start a new chapter in their life; Jobs uses love, loss, discovery, death and adversity to persuade them not to give up as they continue on with their life. He is trying to encourage the grads to use their instinct and follow their dreams to be happy no matter what it is they want to do. Even if what makes you happy doesn’t always go according to plan. The main message of his speech is …show more content…
Even before he begins his speech he is already using Ethos because his audience knows about his success with Apple and how he has accomplished so much. His confidence in his ethos is shown in this line, “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. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay”(Jobs,2005). Not anyone could just say they dropped out of college and became really successful. Jobs had nothing to worry about because he became CEO of Apple and that would not suffer by his lack of college education. He then explains that after dropping out he took a calligraphy course where he learned all about fonts, and everything you would ever need to know about typeface. “The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting”(Jobs,2005). Just this one class taught him what he was going to use one day. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them”(Jobs,2005). As he said that the crowd laughed and …show more content…
At the beginning of his third story he stated the quote, “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right”(jobs,2005). This will be the main quote of his third story, because he reverts back to it and applies it to his life. He then goes on to say how remembering that he will die soon helped him avoid the trap of thinking he has something to lose. By expanding on the topic of death he is suggesting that they should also learn to live each day as if it’s the last. Jobs then talks about being diagnosed with cancer, which creates a sense of sensitivity to his audience, and how that had an even more impact on him than the quote he read about seizing the day when he was seventeen. He goes on to explain, how that was his closest encounters with death and he creatively makes this encounter a part of his ethos because he said, “Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept”(Jobs,2005). He goes on using logos, because to explain how death is intellectual concept by bringing his audience into his example which is very clever and easier to engage the audience. He then talks about how death clears the old and makes room for the new and he goes to tell his audience that they are the new right now but will soon be old too.