Chemical Bonding
Chemical Bonding: Fundamental Concepts Resonance Structures and Formal Charge Electronegativity, Formal Charge and Resonance Page [1 of 3] In this lecture we’re going to pull together ideas about formal charge, resonance structures, electronegativity, and really make some predictions and some rationalizations about why molecules behave the way they do. And the first one I want to do is to go back and look at the cyanate ion. Cyanate is NCO. And in a previous lecture I talked about the fact that there were several different possible resonance structures that are all in equivalence, and that it was possible at least to figure out which one contributed the most and which one contributed the least based on formal charge. So here are the formal charge evaluations for this left-hand resonance structure. Nitrogen has a formal charge of zero. Carbon has a formal charge of zero. Oxygen has a formal charge of -1. For B, nitrogen is -1, carbon is zero, oxygen is zero. And for C, nitrogen is -2, carbon is zero, and oxygen is +1. Now, the rule said that formal charges of plus or minus 1 and zero are okay. In fact, zero is great. And plus or minus 2 and bigger, that’s just not going to work. Why? Because remember, formal charges reflect how the electrons are distributed relative to how they are distributed in the free atom. So how they’re distributed in a molecule versus how they’re distributed in the free atom. And in this case nitrogen has a lot more electrons than it would if were a free atom formally; in other words, an accounting method.
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