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Rhetorical Analysis: Why I Drop Out

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According to a Gallup survey released on November 11, 2011 by Forbes magazine, it showed that “71% of workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their work” (Gallo). In other words, many graduates from college that begin their careers or people who simply get paid hourly, end up disliking and quitting their jobs. The main cause for this statistic is that many people approach a career or apply for a job because of the amount of money they will get paid and its popularity. The solution to the problem is that people need to become more passionate about a subject they like, so that they can pursue a career that relates to what they might do for the rest of their lives. One person who has taken a step into influencing a group of people …show more content…

For example, in the first story “connecting the dots”, he explains the reason for him becoming a drop-out and how this story led to the other stories he later mentioned. He began by asking the rhetorical question “So why did I drop out?” (2). He stated “It started before I was born…and 17 years later I did go to college…after six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. 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” (2). This showed that college was not for Jobs, and that his passion was not any closer to what he wanted to do in life. Another way Jobs showed credibility in his argument is by organizing his speech into a cause and effect structure. The major cause he emphasized was when he became interested in calligraphy classes. Even though he stated that the classes were not going to apply to his life, the effect was that he became the founder of Apple, a 2 billion dollar …show more content…

For example, in the first story he just talks about how his adoption by a working class couple affected his destiny in college because his family’s life savings were being expended on his tuition. Then, in the second story Jobs was fired from his own company, but his love for what he had created motivated him to pursue his dream. This was shown when he stated, “We had just released our finest creation-the Macintosh…And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? … What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating” (3). Getting fired was not a problem to jobs from his point of view because he claimed it was the best thing that happened to him in life. In the third story, the audience showed pity when Jobs emphasized his cancer illness. He explained that it was difficult for him to “say the last goodbyes” to his family. In the speech, Jobs stated “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important toll I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life” (4). This shows that since the moment he heard about his deathly illness, his way of thinking was

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