I can walk into your house and tell you which bedroom is a guest bedroom just by looking (assuming you have one). That's not really a stumbling block to me.
But isn't that because the guest bedroom will look different from a currently occupied one. How can you tell that it was
once a guest bedroom - rather than, say, an abandoned main bedroom? (I'm putting to one side the anachronism of projecting relatively modern architectural conceptions back into a house in the Greyhawk setting.)
you didn't change any word order
Its narrative style in my view. I'd focus on phrases like "rubbish is scattered around what was once a fine guest bedroom" rather than, say, it's a run-down bedroom with rubbish scattered about; there is evidence of rodent infestation ratjher than, say, you can see rats or you can see mouse-droppings everywhere; "its woodwork is worm-ridden" rather than, say, there seem to be termites in the timber; the curtains that once screened the bed are torn and stained rather than, say, the bed has torn, dirty curtains.
My first example changes word order and verb constructions and substitutes an adjective ("run down") for an adverb ("once"). My second example replaces an impersonal, nominalised construction with an active voice sentence. My third example replaces an adjective ("worm-ridden") with a syntactically more complex phrase ("seem to be termites in the timber"). My fourth example substitutes active for passive voice.
I don't think it's accurate to say that I didn't change any word order and only changed vocabulary.
Just look at the first example.
Rubbish is scattered around what was once a fine guest bedroom leads with a main clause ("rubbish is scattered about") that is, as far as information is concerned, of secondary interest. The clause
what was once a fine guest bedroom is the main information-bearing clause from the point of view of describing what's there. The mismatch between syntactic structure and informational structure is a stylistic device. My contrasting formulation -
it's a run-down bedroom with rubbish scattered about - aligns the syntax with the information: the syntactically main clause is also the main information-bearing clause, while the bit about
rubbish is reduced to an adjectival phrase. It's that, not the extremely modest vocabulary change (ie my example replaces
was once fine with
is run down and drops the "guest" because I don't see how the past use of a bedroom as a guest bedroom is knowable by mere visual inspection), that makes my reworking less "narrative" and more conversational.
The analysis I've just offered might also be relevant to the ongoing exchange between [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] and [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] (? I think, haven't gone back to check) about what a conversational style might actually look like.
