发布时间 : 星期三 文章英语分析乔布斯演讲《stay hungry,stay foolish》更新完毕开始阅读
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 12th 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.
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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:
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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 idea how college was going to help me figure it out. …The minute 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、want、idea、figure、lucky、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
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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
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