There Will Come Soft Rains

Assignment: This is an especially interesting essay for an online class because we'll look at the role of technology in our culture. We'll read one of my favorite short stories, a science fiction piece about the world after we're gone, and we'll and discuss its implications for our lives.

What point is Bradbury making with this story? Story is: August, 2006: There Will Come Soft Rains
I want you to stick close to the text of the story to support your points. The story itself should be your only source.

The guidelines There Will Come Soft Rains Research Paper:

1. Length: 3-4 pages
2. Support: To support the points you make, include quotes and vivid details from the story itself.
3. Quotes: You may use quotes from any source to prove a point. Be sure, though, that your quotes are smoothly integrated with your own words. This is an essential skill for writing well, and if you don't master it, you won't do well in this class. Remember that any exact words that are borrowed from another source need to be in quotation marks.
4. Documentation: Use MLA documentation. In essence, MLA says that whenever you quote, summarize, paraphrase, or borrow statistics or facts, you need to tell readers where your information came from. The system has two basic parts: first, in your essay's paragraph, you give us the author's last name and the page number where you found the borrowed information. You'll give these two details in some combination of signal phrase and parentheses. This detail, then, will connect us to the Works Cited page, which you need to include on the back of your essay, where we will find the full bibliographic information for every source that is cited in the paper.
5. Organization: Be sure to give us a standard academic essay. Here's a description of a standard academic essay:

a. Introductory paragraph: Open with general information about the ideas to be discussed and lead readers to the last sentence of the paragraph, which should be the thesis statement - this is one sentence that states the main point of the essay. Be sure that in this sentence, you've got a clear purpose in mind; in other words, know at this point whether you're going to keep this an objective, 3rd-person analysis of the literature, or you're going to use the literature to make your own point. You can do either for this assignment, but they're different essays, different approaches, and they require different thesis statements.

b. Body Paragraphs: You need at least three, but you can certainly have more. Each paragraph should have one clear main point. The easiest, most obvious technique of sharing the paragraph's main point is to state it in a topic sentence, which is usually the first sentence of the paragraph. Sometimes the topic sentence works as the last sentence, and sometimes the topic can be implied, without an actual topic sentence. You've got to be sure, though, that the paragraph does, indeed, have a single main point. The purpose of the paragraph, then, is not only to make the point, but also to prove it with examples and quotes (or facts, statistics, anecdotes, details, etc.). A good rule of thumb (although I hate hard and fast rules of writing because each essay is different!) is that you should have three bits of support (quotes or examples) for each body paragraph. Each example should follow the intro/quote/analysis pattern. This means that you use your words to st!
ate the idea; then you introduce the quote with a signal phrase (e.g., He says, " ..."); and finally you write a sentence or so pulling out the significance of the quote -- analyzing (explaining) how the quote supports the point.

c. Concluding Paragraph: Without repeating exactly what you've already said, remind us of the essay's main point and move on to discuss the significance - the implications in our own lives - of the ideas you've discussed.