Tricolon Steve Jobs Rhetorical Analysis

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Nishan Panwar said, “Follow your passions, follow your dreams, but most of all follow your heart.” Steve Jobs advocated for this type of attitude at his Commencement Address at Stanford University in 2005. Using tricolon, antithesis, and pathos, Jobs urged the graduates to follow their dreams despite struggles in life.
Tricolon is a series of three words, phrases, or sentences that are parallel in structure, length, or rhythm. Tricolon is often remembered more clearly due to the use of three. Jobs first uses it when he describes his living conditions after dropping out of college due to his lack of interest and money.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned coke bottles for …show more content…

He didn’t become rich instantly. He continued to follow his dreams and passions despite his struggles. He eventually signed up for the best calligraphy class in the country because it piqued his interest. Steve Jobs described what he learned as “beautiful, historical, and artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating” (8). Jobs eventually found something that he found fascinating to pursue, knowing that it had no hope of practical use in life. A decade later, Jobs was able to use the lessons he learned in that class to build the first Mac and build up Apple from the ground up. All of Job’s wealth came from him following his dreams without …show more content…

The story of Jobs struggle with death invokes the feeling of helplessness and sadness within the audience. When Jobs finds out that most types of pancreatic cancer are incurable he had to live with the fact that he would die. When he finds out that it is curable, he realizes that nobody wants to die, a sentiment that everyone shares. While facing death, he realizes that time is limited and says “don’t waste it living someone else’s life…. have the courage to follow your own heart and intuition” (26). By telling this story, he brings up the circumstance of death. It can happen at any time to anyone. This invokes a feeling of helplessness and sadness within the audience. Death is unequivocal, so he urges his audience to follow their dreams while they can because they might not be able to the next

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