The nice thing about bright people is they often have an innate aptitude for taking control of their own meta-cognitive development. For a kid it may just take a little prompting to get them thinking about building their own toolkit of tricks and skills to get past their stuckednesses.
Unfortunately, at this point he hates writing and has no desire to ever get better. Intellectually he knows that he has to in order to get through school and achieve his goals (become a chemist), but that doesn't stop the negative attitude (which I'm not criticizing him for; I think it's understandable, but must be overcome somehow).
