How does one stop being careless (serious question here guys)?

Okay, I’m not supposed to be on here anyway, but there’s this problem I need to solve. There’s a very close friend of mine. He’s sixteen and schooling.

Now, he’s an incredibly intelligent person, he’s able to think at a very advanced level is able to argue his opinions very well. The problem is that he’s just so extremely careless in his written work. He makes careless mistakes all the time in essays and in mathematical tests and this costs him precious marks.

He’s approached his teachers countless times and all they’ve been able to tell him is to be more careful. I myself have been trying to help him a lot with his work and have been trying to give him my own advice (which runs along the same lines of the teachers, such as checking your work, doing it slower, going over it again etc. etc.). But the problem is that it doesn’t really seem to be helping. This wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t make that many careless mistakes, but from what I’ve gathered, he makes a lot more careless mistakes than the average person. Plus, there are a few grammatical rules he doesn’t quite grasp (such as the difference between ‘would’ and ‘will’), which might just complicate this improvement process.

I’ve been constantly pushing him without much progress. And believe it or not, I’ve actually gotten into pretty bad arguments with him about this. The thing is, he’s extremely frustrated with it all. He tells me that really wants to improve and has been really trying, just that the results don’t show it.

So now I’m asking the collective, how do you stop being careless? I have here my really good friend who has this problem and really needs to solve it. And in my eyes, it takes on an even more desperate aspect when he you take into account the fact that he wants to go into journalism (he’s argued that journalists have editors to help with grammar, but I personally pooh-pooh this argument because in the media competition is stiff and if your grammar is more problematic than average, then you’re pretty much doomed. Am I right in this?).

Side-note: He finds it sad that perfect grammar in this world has in some ways taken precedence over what is written (ie content). And despite all that we’ve argued about, I can actually sympathise with this viewpoint. I might just make this into another Fluther discussion when I have the time.

But for now.. The issue at hand. Can the collective please help? Are there any really good methods to deal with horrible carelessness?