A client sends over a homepage and says the copy is not landing. Nine times out of ten, we read it and the sentences are perfectly competent. The grammar is clean, the tone is fine, the words are spelled correctly. And it still does not work — because no one ever decided what the page was supposed to do, to whom, or what single idea it had to leave behind.
This is the difference between a copy problem and a positioning problem. A copy problem is "this sentence is clumsy." A positioning problem is "this entire page is trying to be relevant to four different audiences with three different messages, so it lands with none of them." You cannot rewrite your way out of the second one. You have to decide your way out.
The test we use is brutal and fast: can you say, in one sentence, what this page is for and who it is talking to? If the answer takes a paragraph, the page will take a miracle. We have watched teams spend a month polishing prose on a page that needed a decision, not an edit. The polish makes a confused page read like a confident confused page.
So we refuse to start writing until the positioning question is answered. It feels slower. It is not. The page that knows its job writes itself in half the time, because every sentence has a clear test to pass: does this move the reader toward the one action, or not? Cut what does not. What remains is short, and it works.