A Rhetorical Analysis Of Steve Job's Speech

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement at Stanford University’s graduation ceremony. Just a year before the speech, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (Peña). Jobs used the speech as an opportunity to inspire the students to, in a way, follow in his footsteps. He is most known for his creation of Apple, and in order to achieve that and the things he did he had to follow his own dreams and make himself happy (Jobs). In the speech, Jobs is arguing that life is too short for you to not live it for yourself and make yourself happy. The appeals of logos, pathos, and ethos; narration of the three stories he tells; and use of cause and effect give make his argument persuasive. His narration is the majority of his speech and provides the most support for his argument. Throughout the stories he told, he

His stories are about his life but he makes them relate to his audience so they feel included and inspired. By including them it makes his tone genuine and serious. He makes it sound like he genuinely wants them to follow their dreams and be successful like he was, even if it on a smaller scale. They may already be graduating but they are still young and have time to change their mind if they do not want to go into the field they received their degree for. All of these strategies together easily make his argument persuasive. The narration made it easy to add in cause and effect, and the logos, pathos, and ethos appeals. To make a good argument you need multiple strategies of argumentation and Jobs did exactly that. He managed to include multiple strategies while also considering his audience and using his tone to make them feel important. That is it extremely important because he is not trying to convince himself or the staff of the college to listen to do what makes them happy; he is trying to convince the students to do what makes them