How Is Ethos Used In Steve Jobs Speech

Co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc, Steve Jobs, in his commencement speech at stanford university, illustrates three distinguishable points of his life. Jobs’ is very successful in his approach to inspire the graduates by speaking on the experience and insight he has gained. Jobs has a simplistic yet elegant tone and diction to convey his hardships to communicate how much life has to give and teach us in an inspirational way.
Jobs begins his speech by dethroning himself as the well-known self made billionaire to create a connection to the graduates. He starts by putting the audience on a higher plateau with “I am honored to be with you”(1) and “ this is the closest I have been to a college graduation”(2) and when speaking of himself and his speech, he states it is “No big deal”. These strong pathos appeals and honorific terms in return build his credibility to his audience. This use of pathos to build ethos is quite effective in opening the ears of everyone in the audience.

The start of his life includes his biological mother putting him up for adoption and then the supposed adopters did not want him either. Jobs says “he popped out [then] they decided they really wanted a girl”(10). The greek like tragedy continues when Jobs’ biological mother finds out the parents of her child's father “did not graduate high school” (13) while his mother “did not graduate college”(12). He states his emotional up bringing with strong details, ethos, to shape his credibility in a story from his childhood, “ it started when I was born”. This part of Jobs’ speech was overflowing with emotions and gathered all the sentiment from the