Good afternoon class,

Introduction

Steve Jobs was born on February 25, 1955 in San Francisco, California. Steve was an inventor,
entrepreneur, and visionary. He was the co-founder of the Apple Computer Company and the CEO of
PIXAR and NeXT. Steve is best known for his influence on the technology world, but he is also
recognized for his brilliant speaking ability.

Today I will represent my analysis of the Steve Jobs speech “Stanford Commencement address” on June
12, 2005. The main message of his speech was to convince the audience to have courage in life, to not
give up in their goals and do what they love. In his speech Jobs used many rhetorical strategies to
convey his message, but for the purpose of this analysis have selected to discuss only three: parallelism,
metaphor and repetition.

Parallelism

In the first story, he talks about his college experience and how he decided to drop all courses in first six
months of college. He believes that it was the best thing that ever happened to him because it allowed
him to stop taking classes that did not interest him, and instead, to only attend the ones that looked
interesting. This led Jobs to discover his love for calligraphy,
In his speech Jobs says:
”It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it
fascinating.’’
In this sentence he used the rhetorical figure Parallelism. This use of Parallelism really emphasizes the
beautifulness of the typography, and plants a clear image of it in the audiences’ mind. 

Metaphor

The next strategy that I would like to discuss is metaphor. Jobs used a metaphor to describe how his
decisions in the past came together and connected in the future.
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have
to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

What Jobs meant by this metaphor is that you can’t plan out your life or know how an experience will
effect you, you can only look in the past and realize what experience brought you to this point.

Repetition

In the end, he closes the speech with a quote. He says that he read the quote when he was 17 year that
it left a strong impression on him.
Jobs said,
“On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you
might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

At the end of the speech Jobs repeated several times “Stay Hungry. Stay foolish” using repetition as a
strategy to drive the main idea.
Conclusion

To sum up, today I presented an analysis of Steve Jobs Commencement Speech by discussing three
rhetorical strategy’s that he used in his speech. The rhetorical strategies were parallelism, metaphor and
repetition.

Steve Jobs delivered the speech well. He adopted a traditional structure that consists of opening, Three
stories and Conclusion. He applied multiple rhetorical strategies, he was enthusiastic and humorous and
effectively delivered the main idea. However, he spent very little time maintaining eye contact with the
audience.