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 derves our exploration to exhibit what the stylistic characteristics. The examination will be carried out in five perspectives, phonological, graphological, lexical, syntactical and mantic analys.
Phonological Features
The speech is delivered in an university and the audiences are mainly from young groups, when faced the young men, Jobs expresd himlf calmly and convectively, he ud pau and stress in different tone appropriately to demonstrate why he was reputable.
. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had …relead 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 ud 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 pau, the pau signals the end of a thought unitIn the ntences, 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.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinkin
g you have something to lo. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone el' already know what you truly want to become. Everything el is condary.
This speech has lots of philosophy, Jobs tried his best to persuade his audiences to receive his views, so he stresd his tone when told the words on purpo, especially at the beginning words of the ntences, such as “again” “remembering”,
as well as in transitional words such as “don’t”. The stress enhanced tone and expresd what he really want to say.
Graphological Features
Punctuation is an important part in ntences. In this speech, it us lots of punctuations, comma、period are prevailing ones, becau the speech has most of short ntences. According to statistics, the speech concludes 139 periods and 101 commas. In usage, co
mma is ud for pau to provided more messages and make it easy to be understood in speech, while comma is ud for stating points to make tone objectively.
In addition, capital is also an aspect of graphological features. Generally, capital is mainly ud in the first letter of the first word in a ntence. In this speech, Jobs ud 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 chon 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 cho their jobs through 3 daily life stories, therefore his lexical are clear and conci, which mainly formed by simple words:
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively cho 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 class 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、cho、want、idea、figure、lucky、stay，etc, it makes the speech easy to understanding, at the same time, it ems more interesting when Jobs shared his experiences.
