| Summary: | 碩士 === 實踐大學 === 應用外語學系英語溝通碩士班 === 104 === Persuasion is an essential communication skill for not only business people or politicians, but any other professionals. Since it is a required skill, learning from well-recognized great rhetoric in the world is a way to improve one’s persuasive skills. One of the persuasive speakers Steve Jobs, who was selected by Harvard Business Review (Hansen, Ibarra & Peyer, 2010) as the best performing CEO in the world in 2010, is a persuasive leader we could learn from. Studying the discourses of Jobs is a necessary step to explore his rhetorical skills. However, although there have been studies on the rhetoric of Steve Jobs, many of them focused on his speeches and interviews; few investigated his business presentations. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the rhetorical moves of Jobs’ discourses in the announcements of Apple’s products and analyze the keywords and bundles realizing the moves.
Since there were lots of business demonstrations presented by Steve Jobs and each business presentation was varied, this study focused on the presentations in Apple’s Special Events in order to explore a specific genre. The researcher decided to analyze ten presentations in the Special Events which the average video length were about an hour. The selection of the presentations in Apple Special Events was based on the important products listed in the reports of The Guardian and Forbes. And, these ten presentations were transcribed as the texts to be analyzed.
Biber’s (2007) top-down corpus-based discourse analysis was adopted as the analytical approach of the study. Aristotle’s model of persuasive strategies was used as the analytical framework of move analysis of the texts. The lexis realizing each move including keywords and the bundles containing the keywords was identified. The results of the move analysis show that Jobs constructed his presentations using three moves. His persuasion strategy was based on the use of concrete information and explanations of specifications of the devices rather than elaborate or redundant adjectives and words.
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