Weak Writing Comes From Weak Opinions
Ever finish a piece of copy and think, “Yeah… this kinda sucks”? It doesn’t hit. Doesn’t move you. Doesn’t feel like it’ll get people to care, let alone click or share or do anything useful with it. It just sits there. Polite. Harmless. Completely forgettable.
And the worst part? You tried. You did the research. You wrote for the audience. You followed the formulas from every “How to Write High-Converting Copy” post you’ve ever saved. And still… nothing.
To write something that actually moves people, that makes them stop scrolling, sit up, and feel something… you need two things:
You need to believe in what you’re saying.
You need to learn how to articulate your beliefs.
Seems simple. It’s not.
Let’s say you just watched a movie so bad it made you angry. You feel robbed. Two hours of your life gone. Your friends ask why you hated it, and all you’ve got is, “Ugh, it was just bad.” That’s not an answer, that’s you admitting you don’t know how to communicate your thoughts.
If you can’t break down why it was bad — what bothered you, what didn’t work, what you expected and didn’t get — then you’re not in touch with your own taste. And if you’re not in touch with your own taste, your writing is always going to feel surface-level.
Because writing is thinking. Out loud. On paper. In public.
If your thoughts are fuzzy, your writing’s going to be fuzzy. If your feelings are half-baked, your writing will be too. And that’s when you end up with the kind of copy people skim, forget, and move on from in half a second.
You can fix this. But you have to train for it.
Start small. Pick a piece of media that made you feel something. A song. A movie. A dumb YouTube video that weirdly stuck with you for three weeks. Doesn’t matter. Write about it. Not like a book report. Write about why it hit you. What it made you feel. What lines stood out. What you noticed. What it reminded you of.
If you do this often enough, something clicks. You stop writing like someone who’s guessing what sounds good and start writing like someone who knows what they mean. And that kind of writing, that’s the good stuff. It’s magnetic. People can feel it. They might not even know why, but they’ll keep reading. They’ll listen.
If you don’t believe me, go watch any YouTube video of a critic breaking something down. Take someone like Anthony Fantano, the man can talk about a song for 20 minutes and keep you hooked the whole time. Or pick up The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Half the book is just him reflecting on his experiences, but the way he talks about them pulls you in. You can feel how invested he is. That kind of energy is contagious, and it all comes from one thing — knowing exactly what you think and being able to express it clearly.
And when it comes to copywriting, the same rule applies.
No, you don’t have to be deeply passionate about air fryers or smart mugs or ergonomic desk chairs. But you do need to understand why someone is. And to do that, you need empathy. You need to be curious. You need to actually give a shit about what other people value and why they value it.
When you can tap into that, and you know how to express it with conviction, your copy stops sounding like an ad and starts sounding like a belief. That’s when people trust it. That’s when they act on it, even if it’s coming from a business.
Because yeah, copywriting is about selling. But passion sells harder than any trick in the book. When you genuinely believe in what you’re saying — whether it’s your own idea or a client’s product — that belief pours into your words. People feel it. They follow it. Sometimes without even realizing why.
This is something AI will never be able to do. Yeah, it can write. It even helped me write this piece. But that raw conviction you feel when you’re fired up about something… the personal taste, the weird metaphors, the stuff you believe so deeply you can’t not say it? That’s human. That’s yours. AI can remix language, but it can’t give it a soul. Only you can do that.
So if your writing feels flat, don’t go looking for a better headline formula just yet. Start with yourself. Start with what you think. What you feel. What you believe.
Get that part sharp, and everything else gets way easier.