And this brings us to the badass EAS activity chart. This chart is going to be the go-to that you can use to learn what groups are electron donating and electron withdrawing, and also if they're going to be ortho, para, or meta directors in regards to EAS. First of all, let's just learn how to navigate this chart. There are 2 major lines that you need to understand here. One, that's the activity line and the other one is the director line. Now the activity line is really just comparing to that of an unsubstituted benzene. What we're saying is that any group that is above that line, above that arrow is going to activate towards further EAS more than regular benzene. Any group that's below that line is going to deactivate it. So as you can see, that's the first set of arrows going up and down. The second arrow is the director arrow. The director arrow says that anything that's above that line is going to be an ortho, para director, and anything that's below that line is going to be a meta director. As you can see, there's a general trend that the activators tend to be ortho, para. The deactivators tend to be meta with basically one noted exception and we'll get there in a second.
Now before talking about the individual groups, let's also talk about some generalizations we can make. Well, it turns out that electron donating groups all have something in common, which is that they give electrons to the benzene. How do they do that? Well, first of all, anything with a negative charge is electron donating. Just keep that in mind. Electron donating by definition, if it has a negative charge, it's going to be giving electrons away. But you can also have basically donated effects by just being an R group. Remember that R groups, through a phenomenon called hyperconjugation, can share some of their electron density with the benzene. Remember that that has to do with the same principle that stabilizes carbocations. The more R groups, the more stable the carbocation. The same thing happens with the benzene ring. The more R groups, the more donating it is. This effect is from hyperconjugation. But the other way that you could donate electrons is through a lone pair, which I've drawn here. An electron donating group could just be any group that has a lone pair right next to the ring and that would be through resonance because that lone pair could enter the ring through resonance structures and it would spend a lot of its time in the ring. That's the general features of electron donating groups. And even if you don't remember a single group here, we're going to go through the groups one by one. But even if you don't remember a single group, you could use that trend to know, hey, is this electron donating? You could just look at it and tell.
Now we've got our electron withdrawing groups. The generalization we can make about electron withdrawing groups is that they have a positive charge. Obviously, anything with a full positive charge right outside the benzene ring is going to pull electrons towards it and deactivate it. But also this goes for partial charges. Anything that has a partial positive charge is going to deactivate the ring. A really easy example of this would be carbonyls. Carbonyls have a partial positive and a partial negative due to dipoles. So if you have a carbonyl carbon right next to a benzene ring, that partial positive is going to pull electrons away. So again, even if you don't remember a single group here, you could use that pattern to deduce, is this going to be electron donating or electron withdrawing. It's really as simple as positive and negative.
Now what I want to do is get into the specific groups that you need to memorize and the order that they're in because the order is actually going to be important for a lot of reasons in this course. Like I told you guys earlier, electron donating, electron withdrawing groups are some of the most popular concepts in organic chemistry too. You definitely want to be familiar with them. We said that anything that's above the line of benzene or reactivity is going to be more reactive than benzene. That definitely holds the case. For example, an R group, let's just say it was a methyl group. That would be called toluene. If that was toluene, so CH₃, this is just an example. Toluene is 24 times more reactive than benzene. We can see that it's definitely a good activator because of the fact