Top Tips for success (1)

Top tips for success – each week or so I will aim to give you some tips for your exams. So here we go, top tip #1:

Organic Chemistry –> Mechanisms

When drawing mechanisms we use ‘curly arrows’.

Ensure you get your curly arrows the correct way around. The arrow head shows where the electrons are going to. The end of the arrow shows where the electrons have come from. Common mistakes in this often have the arrow the wrong way around (especially for benzene).

Arrows will come from a bond or a lone pair of electrons – not from an atom.

Arrows will not go to an atom or a charge – merly along side it.

Ensure that your molecules have the correct number and type of charges.

Here is an example of a correctly drawn mechansm: