Covalent Bonds: Bond Notation

There are a couple of different ways of representing bonds. Since we will be moving onto molecules and will start to see these different notations come up it is worth taking a quick look at them now.

Just A Few

The most fundamental way of representing bonds is by showing the position of the electrons involved using dots.

Since it becomes tedious to draw dots all of the time bonding electrons are replaced with lines.

Sometimes lone pairs are shown using dots and sometimes they aren’t. If they aren’t we should know they are there, but we will cover that later.

However, molecules exist in 3 dimension while our paper is only 2 dimensional. To get around this chemists use wedges bonds to demonstrate that something is coming out of the page.

While they use dashed lines to show that a molecule is going into the page.

We will also see a different type of dashed line the corresponds to a partial bond we will talk more about these when we get to resonance.

Lastly, there is yet another type of dashed line that indicates the presence of H-bonds a type of intermolecular force that we will cover in the lesson after next.

In summary there are ton of different way to indicate bonds. What information is being displayed ultimately determines what notation is used.