To understand the why bonding matters and to understand the effect of polarity we need to look beyond individual bonds and think in terms of molecules.
Remember that a molecule is two or more atoms bonded together (covalently bonded—compounds that are held together by ionic bonds do NOT have molecules). There are numerous ways to understand the way that atoms join together to form molecules, but in this text we will be focusing on just one of those ways—Lewis Dot Structures.
Before Lewis' time, chemists
understood that molecules existed and knew the formulas for many
different types of molecules. What Lewis provided was a way to quickly
determine the general structure of a molecule, including which atoms
were bonded to which and how many electrons were involved in each bond.
The system he created can then be used to determine the
three-dimensional arrangement of the atoms in the molecule, which allows
us to determine the polarity of the entire molecule rather than just of
the individual bonds within that molecule.
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