Steve Jobs demonstrates pathos primarily by building on different emotions that correspond with the audience. Pathos is persuading by appealing to the emotions of the listeners. A way to appeal to a group’s pathos is to connect using emotions in order to build bridges and assure them you understand their journey (Lunsford 33). Steve Jobs accomplishes this argument by recounting his failures, particularly how he founded Apple and built it for over ten years to a two billion company, only to be fired from his own company. Jobs’ firing was a public failure that left him devastated. Anybody can relate to failure, especially young college adults. However, Jobs contends that character is built in the face of adversity; "Getting fired from Apple …show more content…
Jobs provides numerous insights on how everything, like pride and fear, falls away in the face of death; “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” (Jobs). Having the fear of death provides your life with context and Jobs’ plays on these emotions to insist that you should follow your heart. By describing his battle with cancer, the audience can become sympathetic, while more engaged into Jobs’ story and he is able to relay his message, which is that your time is limited and not to waste it living other people’s life (Jobs). Jobs provides motivation to the graduates to have courage to pursue who they want to become. Through sentimental stories, Steve Jobs is able to attract the pathos of the spectators, which allows him to instill his take-away points using another rhetoric called …show more content…
During the speech, Jobs establishes logos through different techniques such as rational, metaphors, facts, and maxims. One method for presenting rational is to join two contrasting ideas. Steve Jobs establishes a clear idea by using an inverse statement: “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward” (Jobs). He uses this idea to explain to the audience that if he had never dropped out of college, then he would never have dropped in on a calligraphy class, which he later used for the typography used in Macintosh personal computers. Therefore, Jobs uses contrasting ideas to convey that you have to trust in something, whether it is your gut, life, karma or destiny (Jobs). His logic is that you cannot connect the dots in the present and that you have to forge your path based on your intuition. Thus, in the future you can connect the dots looking back on your actions. Steve Jobs also provides logos when reminiscing about the struggles involved with dropping out of college. Jobs described the fact that he had to sleep on the floor while staying with friends, having to return Coke bottles for five-cent deposits in order to buy food, and how he would walk seven miles once a week to get one good meal at a local temple (Jobs). Using facts and numerical figures allows Jobs to show the impact of the obstacles he had to incur in his early adult life. Steve was in dire