ABSTRACT
In Chapter 10, chemical formulae and nomenclature were considered. These two systems offer language for discussing compounds, but they do not convey anything about how the atoms that make up the compound are connected. The stabilizing connections between atoms, the lowering of energy that comes from atoms being close together, are called bonds. Bonds are made and broken during a chemical reaction, which makes bonds one of the central concepts in chemistry. There are, broadly, two types of chemical bonds: ionic and covalent. An ionic bond is the term we assign to the attraction between cations and anions. This attraction can be modeled with Coulomb's law (Chapter 9). A covalent bond, in contrast, is the result of atoms sharing electrons. Covalent compounds are often represented by Lewis structures, where a shared pair of electrons is drawn as a line. This chapter focuses on developing an approach to drawing Lewis structures, including properly accounting for formal charge and delocalization.
