This speech was given at the graduation ceremony of students from Stanford University.The purpose of this speech is to share with the audience about Steve Job's experiences in his life, the lessons he learnt from them and his advice to the audience. The audience is the graduates of Stanford University attending the commencement ceremony. The context of the speech is at a commencement ceremony and the tone of the tone of the speech is formal and sincere.
The structure of the speech is rather basic but clear. When giving his personal anecdotes, Steve Jobs uses phrases like "The first story is about connecting the dots.","My second story is about love and loss.", "My third story is about death." to give a preview of the content he is going to cover, hence giving them a clearer outline of his speech.
In his speech, Steve Jobs adopted the "rule of three". He emphasised things through anaphora and repeated it three times. For example, in "learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great", the word "about" was repeated thrice and in " all external expectations, all pride, all fear", the word "all" was repeated thrice to emphasise that everything dissipates else dissipates when one knows that he is going to die.
Steve Jobs also uses antithesis in his speech. For example "If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in", where "dropped out" and "dropped in" are opposing ideas and in "again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.", "looking foward" and "looking backwards" are juxtaposing phrases
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