In his book Pale Blue Dot (1994) the late Carl Sagan wrote about the famous 1990 photograph taken from Voyager 1, showing the earth as a tiny speck of colour in a square of black. As part of something I’ve been working on, I colour-coded one of my favourite passages from this book according to its parts of speech so I could see them more clearly. I thought it looked pretty so I’ve posted it below. The results are surprising. Style guides often tell you that the verbs should drive a sentence and you should avoid overly nouny sentences. But that last 80 word sentence of Sagan’s (which the style guides would also say is far too long) is full of nouns, and has only one verb – and it reads like a dream.

Key: Nouns Verbs Articles Adverbs Adjectives Prepositions Conjunctions

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.