Rhetorical Analysis Of Steve Jobs Speech

Conrad Hill once said “You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward.” Steve Jobs reiterates this during his 2005 Stanford graduating class commencement speech. In it, Jobs talks to the graduates about his experiences and how they apply to the concept of never giving up. By guiding the audience through events in his life, Jobs encourages them to keep moving forward, and to never settle with what’s been given to them. He accomplishes this by asking thought-provoking questions that make the audience feel and think about what is truly important, and by convincing them to take any and all opportunities that they may encounter, because they never know when one could lead to success.

Steve Jobs starts his speech with a great deal of credibility. His introduction, by Stanford president John Hennessy, emphasizes the success Jobs has had in his companies and other ventures. Jobs’ name is already

This includes a lot of formal terms and informal phrases, which Jobs weaves together to convince the audience that he can be as personal as he is professional. Jobs uses this trade off when he talks about his termination from Apple, humbly saying that he felt that he had failed the “next generation of entrepreneurs”. He says this to show that his failure does not cause him fury or despair, and he says his feelings at that moment frankly. He also says that when he was out of Apple, he was “very publicly” out. This formal vocabulary emphasizes the supposed finality of his time with Apple, which is vindicated when he eventually rejoin the company. When talking about your life compared to death, Jobs states that we are already “naked”, which serves to show that death is the great equalizer. Using formal diction sprinkled in with personal accounts, Jobs convinces the audience that he is a man that can speak confidently about some very difficult subjects in his