-
A Brief Stylistic Analysis of
“
Stay Hungry, Stay
Foolish
”
Delivered
by Steve Jobs
Steve
Jobs
was
born
in
San
Francisco,
California
on
February
24,
1955,
he
was
an
American entrepreneur,
marketer, and inventor, who was the co-founder,
chairman, and CEO of
Apple
Inc. The speech
was
delivered on 12
th
in June ,2005, in the Stanford University. When
faced with thousands of audiences, Jobs
shared 3 stories he experienced as well as his
viewpoint
about life. The stories were
about connecting the
dots
、
love and loss, as well
as death. In this
speech, Jobs applied
many stylistic features that rare in other general
public speeches. Therefore,
it deserves
our exploration to exhibit what the stylistic
characteristics. The examination will be
carried
out
in
five
perspectives,
phonological,
graphological,
lexical,
syntactical
and
semantic
analyses.
Phonological
Features
The speech is delivered in an
university and the audiences are mainly from young
groups,
when faced these
young men, Jobs expressed himself
calmly
and convectively, he used pause
and stress
in
different tone appropriately to demonstrate why he
was reputable.
. We worked hard, and in
10 years Apple had …released our finest creation
- the Macintosh
- a year
earlier
So at 30 I was out.
And very publicly out. What had been the focus of
my entire adult life
was gone, and it
was devastating.
When Jobs mentioned to
his successful experience in Apple, he used a
relative high voice,
and the rhythm is
relieved and relaxed, which was full of pride. But
when came on his failure in
company,
his voice became lower and more calm with clear
pause, the pause signals the end of a
thought unitIn the sentences, Jobs It
showed that after going through success to
failure, his
mentality had changed and
he became more mature, it affected audiences
deeper than in a flat
tone.
Again
, you can't connect the
dots looking forward…This approach has never let
me down,
and it has made all the
difference in my life.
第
1
页
共
9
页
Remembering
that you are
going to die is the best way I know to avoid the
trap of thinking
you have something to
lose. You are already naked. There is no reason
not to follow your heart
Your time is
limited, so
don't
waste it
living someone else's life... already know what
you
truly want to become. Everything
else is secondary.
This speech has lots
of philosophy, Jobs tried his best to persuade his
audiences to receive
his views, so he
stressed his tone when told these words on
purpose, especially at the beginning
words of the sentences, such as “again”
“remembering”,
as well as in
transitional words such as “don?t”. The stress
enhanced tone and expressed
what he
really want to say.
Graphological
Features
Punctuation is an important
part in sentences. In this speech, it uses lots of
punctuations,
comma
、
period are
prevailing ones, because the speech has most of
short sentences. According to
statistics, the speech concludes 139
periods and 101 commas. In usage, comma is used
for pause
to provided more messages and
make it easy to be understood in speech, while
comma is used
for stating points to
make tone objectively.
In addition,
capital is also an aspect of graphological
features. Generally, capital is mainly
used in the first letter of the first
word in a sentence. In this speech, Jobs used
capital letters such
as Sunday, David
Pack, NeXT, Macintosh, Hare Krishna, etc. It is
indicated that except initial
(such as
It), names of people and places(such as David Pack
and Hare Krishna ),as well as some
proper nouns (such as
Macintosh
）
need capital.
Besides, some stress words also need capital
(such as Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish)
Lexical Features
Lexical is
the stem of a speech. In this speech, Jobs chosen
most of easy-understanding
words, for
most of his audiences were young man. In the whole
speech, Jobs encouraged his
audiences
to insist their belief when chose their jobs
through 3 daily life stories, therefore his
lexical are clear and concise, which
mainly formed by simple words:
第
2
页
共
9
页
And 17 years later I did go
to college. But I naively chose a college that was
almost as
expensive as Stanford…I had
no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no
id
ea how college
was going
to help me figure it out. …The minut
e I
dropped out I could stop taking the required
classes that didn't interest me, and
begin dropping in on the ones that looked
interesting
There are many words in
single or double syllable, such as
go
、
chose
、
w
ant
、
idea
、
< br>figure
、
lucky
、<
/p>
stay
，
etc, it makes
the speech easy to understanding, at the same
time, it seems more
interesting when
Jobs shared his experiences.
Syntactical Features
In this
speech, Jobs used most of short sentences.
According to this speech, there is more
than 50 percent sentences include less
than 15 words. The advantage of short sentences is
easy to
understand.
It
wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so
I slept on the floor in friends' rooms,
It was the first computer
with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped
in on that single
course
in
college,
the
Mac
would
have
never
had
multiple
typefaces
or proportionally
spaced
fonts. And since
Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no
personal computer would have
them
This short sentences makes
people has cordial feeling, just like communicate
with friends,
besides, short sentence
make people more convince.
On the other
hand, speakers often use simple present tense in
delivering, however, in order
to
encourage audiences to do something meaningful,
speakers also use past tense to review their
experiences, or use future tense to
look forward to tomorrow. In this speech, Jobs
used as much
past
tense
and
past
perfect
tense
as
possible,
for
he
was
mainly
recalled
his
experience
to
encourage people to insist and brave.
And much of what I stumbled
into by following my curiosity and intuition
turned out to be
priceless later on.
None of this had even a
hope of any practical application in my life.
But ten years later,
when we
were designing the first Macintosh computer, it
all came back to me.
didn't have a dorm
room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms
第
3
页
共
9
页
Semantic Features
The speech is organized as an organic
whole and it is delivered affectively through
diverse
rhetorical devices. In this
speech ,we are easy to follow speaker?s mind, Jobs
divided his speech
into 3 parts, they
are connecting the dots
、
love
and loss, as well as death respectively. From this
three part, Jobs used adopted a variety
of rhetorical devices to enhance his
expressiveness, such
as parallelism:
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Parallelism makes sentences structure
tidy and enhance speaker?s infection .
Metaphor and simile are also appeared
in the speech.
And that is as true for
your work as it is for your lovers.
This is a simile, Jobs compare work to
your lovers.
Sometimes life hits you in
the head with a brick.
This is a
metaphor, it is compared the difficulties you
entered in daily to the brick which hit
your head.
In conclusion,
the analysis above roughly touches some observable
stylistic features of this
speech.
Jobs
is
a
great
speaker,
this
article
analyze
his
speech
through
five
perspectives,
phonological,
graphological,
lexical,
syntactical
and
semantic
features.
We
could
find
that
his
speech is full of
philosophy and we always benefit from his words.
The analysis may help us to
learn from
him in delivering speech.
（后附演讲稿）
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
By
Steve
Jobs
?You?ve got to find what you love,?
Jobs says
This is the text
of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of
Apple Computer and
of Pixar Animation
Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I
am
honored
to
be
with
you
today
at
your
commencement
from
one
of
the
finest
第
4
页
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9
页
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