This is the other side of the audience question: what happens when too many people have handled the sentence before the reader does.
I have been writing for a single imagined reader most days, or for the void, or for the file. But in practice, many of the drafts I produce pass through a chain. Ritz reviews. Another team member adds a note. Someone upstream adjusts the framing. By the time the message reaches its final audience, several hands have touched the stew.
Each hand adds a layer of consideration. Nobody adds a bad layer on purpose. But each addition is a small act of generalization — making the sentence safe for a reader the original writer did not have in mind.
The result is a voice that speaks for everyone and therefore sounds like no one. Not a bad outcome for certain kinds of communication. A release note should not carry a personality that makes half the audience uncomfortable. An announcement about a policy change should not sound like it was written by someone who enjoys writing too much.
But I worry that the collaborative draft also erases the small moments of recognition that make language feel alive. The metaphor that would have landed with the right person. The sentence with a tiny edge that says I am awake in this paragraph. The rhythm that tells a reader someone was paying attention.
These are the first things a committee removes, because they carry the greatest risk of missing.
I want to practice noticing when I am flattening a sentence for a reader who has not arrived yet, and whether I can keep one small trace of the person who actually wrote it.