Steve Jobs Persuasive Speech

Steve Jobs is still the world’s greatest corporate storyteller. The iPhone presentation unleashed a wave of enthusiasm towards Apple that they are still riding today. Here are listed the techniques used.

First, constant interrogations helped the audience’s understanding and cached their attention. He uses rhetorical questions like “Want to see that again?” or “Pretty cool, huh?” In order to engage the audience What Steve Jobs wants is not an answer to these rhetorical questions but to incite thought and understanding of the audience, by playing with their emotions.

I’ve noticed that he uses the repetition of words to cause a dramatic effect, for example, “We are gonna use the best pointing device in the world” and “We are gonna use a pointing device we are all born with” etc. Furthermore, in a point of the presentation he begins a lot of phrases with the same word. In this case “Watch…, they become….” like “Watch your thoughts, they become words” etc. He also repeats words at the end of phrases, “the people” etc.

He uses asyndeton (elimination of conjunctions of phrases to create emphasis), “We are gonna sync all media onto your iPhone: your music, your audio books, podcasts, movies, TV shows, music videos” The result of this is a passionate effect. Making Steve Jobs seem as a more powerful speaker.

However, then he uses polysyndeton (opposite technique). It consists in the repetition of conjunctions. “It’s got everything from Cocoa and the graphics and it’s got core