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Rhetorical Analysis Of Steve Jobs Commencement Speech

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CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, Steve Jobs, in his commencement address, You've got to find what you love, detailed his path to success in life, while overcoming many obstacles along the way. Jobs’ purpose was to convey to the graduating class that you don’t have to attend college in order be successful and you must live each day as if it is your last. He used a compelling tone in order to convey his message to the students through three significant life events he experienced.
Jobs began his commencement speech by illustrating the importance of “connecting the dots in life” Jobs, 2005, Pg.1). Jobs’ appealed emotionally to the audience by a lone diction addressing his childhood adoption. “My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption” (Jobs, 2005, Pg.1). This detached sense of emotion conveyed an ominous sense of tone between the speaker and the audience. Jobs generated a poetic diction through the phrase “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards” (Jobs, …show more content…

Jobs’ portrayed a concrete diction through the phrase “I was lucky, I found what I loved to do so early in life” (Jobs, 2005, Pg. 2). This phrase helped the language of the text reflect back to Jobs’ purpose of the commencement speech. Jobs’ later got fired from Apple Corporations,“I felt that I had let the previous generations of entrepreneurs down- that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me” (Jobs, 2005, Pg.2). Jobs’ enlightened tone slowly declined into a calm, gloomy mood which portrayed that not everything in life came easy to Jobs and success was earned through hard work and devotion. Jobs’ purpose in this second story was to illustrate the difficult times he had, however through determination and hard work he was able to overcome them and do what he

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