January 29, 2021
Analysis of Steve Jobs Commencement Speech
What has been the backbone for good speeches was how that speaker connected with the audience by excelling in story, tone, and delivery. The speaker has to present themselves as a confident and trustworthy person, but most of all be authentic and true to themselves.
This is essential for commencement speeches at universities where students could use a little wisdom and guidance to kickstart their new lives. By mixing in relevant personal experience and knowledge that contain fundamentals of life, a good commencement speech can have a long lasting effect on the audience.
Steve Jobs delivered his commencement speech to thousands of students in the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University in California, close to home. Jobs showed his true colors in his commencement speech by explaining his passion through three thoughtful life stories. These were the driving force for the rhetorical approach that made his speech effective.
The rhetorical appeals ethos, pathos, and logos helped him achieve his goal in persuading the multicultural graduating class. By orating the trials and tribulations of his life, he smoothly connected it with his real goal of the speech, to motivate you to pursue your passion.
His approach to the speech was to be able to use his life experience in conjunction with rhetorical appeals in the presentation. He knows that he can’t provide useful information regarding education but he effectively uses ethos to show that he is qualified to talk about what he’s talking about because of his successful life experience in the opposite route.
He doesn’t do that to make the audience feel bad about going to school but to show them that he is human too, that he as well climbed through darkness and came out successful despite all of his hardships.
As you look into the crowd, you can see a diverse group of students that were all tentatively watching Steve as he spoke profoundly about life and finding real passion. His authenticity and humor appears in the beginning of his speech when he mentions that he never actually graduated from college, “truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.
” This use of language reminds the audience that he’s just a regular guy, rather than view him as a giant figure. He situates himself as this young guy who dropped out to pursue his dreams rather than someone who easily wound up in his position. Setting the audience at ease, he authenticates himself by being truthful about his life but also breaks the ice by cracking a light hearted joke.
The structure of the rest of the speech was easy to follow because he tells three stories in chronological order starting out with his birth and ending with near present day. Delivering the speech that way allows the listener to follow along and make sense of the events that led to that moment with the students.
He smoothly connects one story to another without straying away from the primary focus by making sense of all of his anecdotes through logos that explain how those events motivated him at different points in his life.
