Steve Jobs’ Art Of Rhetoric

Commercial rhetoric is an important genre of rhetoric. Nowadays, there are commercial activities all over the world, and commercial rhetoric has crucial effects on them all the time. The late Steve Jobs as the co-founder and ex-CEO of Apple, was an outstanding practitioner of commercial rhetoric. All of his products-launching presentations and public speeches drew intense attention from the world. His speech skills and rhetorical strategies would remain of great value to all those who are engaged in investors pitching, advertizing, new-products launch and sales to emulate.By employing relevant theories of rhetoric such as Aristotle’s three artistic proofs of ethos, pathos and logos, as well as some central rhetorical concepts-persuasion, audience and so on, after giving an introduction of Jobs’ early personal life,personality and professional career, the thesis offers an in-depth analysis of Jobs’ presentations, including his iPod launch in2001, PowerBook launch in2003, iPhone launch in2007, iPhone4crisis management in2010as well as his commencement address at Stanford University in2005. The aim of the thesis is to explore Jobs’ art of rhetoric, as is manifested in Jobs’ awareness and emotional manipulation of audience, the way he projected his ethos and established his authority, his organization of rigorous logical argumentation, and other newly-emerged rhetorical resources and strategies he employed to win over his audience. Above all, we mean to provide commercial rhetors with some practical advice in the commercial rhetoric field.