Steve Jobs Rhetorical Analysis

Having been an entrepreneur, inventor, and marketer, Jobs played a crucial role in the evolution of technology considering he started the world’s most successful computer company in world in his own garage. In 2005, the late Steve Jobs made an intriguing commencement speech at Stanford University at the graduation ceremony. His speech focused on three main stories: the first was about connecting the dots, the second was about his was about love and loss, and his third was about death. Using examples from his own life, Jobs shared a speech that was appealing to the audience. The speech is effective and interesting because of his use of rhetoric, specifically, his use of ethos, pathos, and Kairos.

The first statement he makes in his speech is

Kairos is defined as “making use of the particular moment—attempting to capture in words what will be immediately applicable, appropriate, and engaging for a particular audience. Kairos is timeliness, appropriateness, decorum, symmetry, balance—awareness of the rhetorical situation.” He used the 2005 graduation at Stanford to discuss his thoughts on failure and overcoming it. There could not have been a more appropriate audience to share this with other than a graduating class of college students because once they left school, they were going to fail at times and they needed to know that failure is okay. The main words of encouragement he said to support his Kairos were “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” These couple of statements prove his Kairos, but they are also in support of his ethical appeal and prove his persona also. He is able to speak those words with authority because he realized how much time is limited when he was diagnosed with cancer, he was definitely not trapped by dogma considering he started a computer company in his garage, and he never let anyone’s opinions get him down. Just because Apple fired him from his own company, he never let that stand in his way of creating and following his dreams, and he went back to the company stronger than