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Strategy of Sharing Unpaired Electrons

The strategy of sharing unpaired electrons and aiming for octets works for
all sorts of molecules. For example, the molecules NF3 and CH4 are formed
from atoms as follows:

N H
F F C H
H
F
F N F H H C H
F H

Drawing all these dots gets tedious, so we usually just draw a line for each
shared pair of electrons:

F N F H C H

F H

As we said previously, a line between two atoms is understood to rep-


resent two shared electrons, which constitute a covalent bond. Therefore,
shared pairs of electrons are often called bonding pairs. Any unshared
electron pairs, such as the three pairs on the F atoms and the one pair on
the N atom in NF3, are called lone pairs because they belong to a single
(lone) atom.

F N F
Lone pair of electrons
Bonding pair of electrons
F

Note that not all atoms in a molecular dot diagram necessarily have lone
pairs (two examples are the carbon atom in methane and hydrogen atoms
in any molecule). Because they are not shared, lone pairs are not directly
involved in bonding. Nevertheless, they are important and should never be
left out of a molecular dot diagram.

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