Drawing and Understanding Diagrams

    The ability to draw and interpret the different diagrams that are used to represent the different conformations is an important skill to acquire. The only person that will be decieved by your poor diagrams is you ! the examiner will be able to tell instantly that you are struggling....

    These diagrams allow 3D representations of molecules to be drawn on the 2D world of a piece of paper (or computer screen), in a similar way to which one can look at the plans for a house.

Wedge-dash diagrams:
Usually drawn with two bonds in the plane of the page, one infront, and one behind to give the molecule perspective. When drawing wedge-dash it is a good idea to visualise the tetrahedral arrangement of the groups and try to make the diagram "fit" this. As a suggestion, they seem to be most effective when the "similar" pairs of bonds (2-in-plane, 2-out-of-plane) are next to each other, see below:

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