How To Draw Resonance Structures: Avoiding Common Mistakes No discussion of resonance structures would be complete without mention of how to royally screw them up. This isn’t something to feel…
Read more…worst. I’ve done pretty much every dumb thing in a lab you can possibly do. But being new at something is actually pretty liberating. You’re expected to make mistakes. You…
Read morePentavalent (a.k.a. “Texas”) Carbons So what are some of the most common mistakes we can make in organic chemistry? Given the relatively qualitative nature of sophomore organic chemistry, it should…
Read more…substituents in the plane of the page. The fact that it is “surprisingly easy” to screw up drawing tetrahedral carbon may only be in fact surprising to newbies. Experienced students…
Read more…the 25 “How to do well in organic chemistry” essays that I’ve looked through, here’s the breakdown of the most common words of wisdom: Most common advice on “What to…
Read moreResonance In Organic Chemistry: What Are “Pi Acceptors” Last time we saw that π donors are atoms capable of forming a new π bond with an adjoining C-C π bond….
Read more…aesthetic purposes. It gets more complicated from there of course. The CH3 group comes up so often that we have a common abbreviation for it – “Me”, for methyl. NOT…
Read more…a few of the less common (but still important) reactions you learn in organic chemistry 1. We’ve talked about rearrangements and free-radical substitution: we finish up here with lots of…
Read more…is axial (when it’s equatorial the antibonding orbital points into the ring, making it inaccessible to attack. These are also extremely common exam type questions. Why? Because they combine concepts…
Read more…name for the Cat Line diagram is the “Line-Wedge” diagram since we use wedges to depict the parts that come out of the page, normal lines to depict the parts…
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