So now let's talk about probably one of the most helpful topics in this entire chapter, and that's the topic of bonding preferences. This is something that I remember when I was an undergrad and I was taking organic chemistry, I was really confused about because my professor often would just assume that I understood how atoms worked and how atoms bonded. I remember my professor would say, "Oh, nitrogen forms 3 bonds, and oxygen with a positive charge forms 3 bonds." I thought I was supposed to memorize all this stuff. It was really confusing. It turns out that there's really simple logic that we can use to figure out exactly how many bonds every atom wants to have. Once you have this down, you're never going to forget it. So, let's go ahead and move just right along.
Bonding preferences are based on the concept of octet electrons but also based on another type of electron. Let's talk about it. It turns out that there are actually several ways to combine octet electrons in order to satisfy the octet rule for an atom. "Valence electrons" is the name that we give to the octet electrons that the atom actually owns. So remember that we said that atoms can choose to share electrons in bonds or they can choose to have electrons as lone pairs. Both of them are going to count the same in terms of octet electrons because they're surrounding part of the shell. But they're actually going to count differently in terms of the valence count.
The number of valence electrons is going to determine which of the octets you could make. If there are several versions of octets, it's going to determine which of the octets is the most stable. This is the really basic rule. We're going to say that an atom is going to own every lone electron that it has, and it's going to own only one electron for every bond that it has. A really nice easy way to say this is that it's going to own every dot, one electron for every dot, and it's also going to own one electron for every stick. So, I'm just going to say dot equals 1 and also stick equals 1. That's just another way to say it.