What I want to talk about is what we just did, which I call bond making. All of this involved forms of bond making where I am basically indicating that all these arrows represent the sharing of 2 electrons. And I said that after the reaction, you're going to replace that arrow with a sigma bond. So that means that all of these arrows that I just drew are eventually going to become little sticks that I draw off each of these atoms. So that's going to be a stick. That's going to be a stick. And that's going to be a stick. I hope that you understand that what I'm saying is that an arrow is just a really long way of drawing a single bond that's going to be formed.
Now what I want to talk about is bond breaking. Bond breaking is sometimes required in mechanisms, but it's only required when it's needed to preserve octets. So what that means is that just like resonance structures, remember that sometimes we would want to make a bond, but that bond would break the octet of a certain atom. So then what would we do to fix that? We would also break a bond. We would make a bond and then we would break a bond in order to preserve the octet of that atom. In the same way, we're going to want to break bonds in order to preserve octets of atoms that are getting attacked.
