Balancing of Redox Reactions

Once a reaction has been confirmed as redox and its oxidant and reductant identified, the next task is to write a correctly BALANCED equation for it -- one where the number of atoms of every element, and the total charge, match on both sides. Two standard, systematic methods are used for this in redox equations specifically (ordinary atom-counting is not always enough once ions and electron transfer are involved): the oxidation number method (Section 6.3.1), which balances the equation by tracking the total increase and total decrease in oxidation number across the whole reaction, and the ion-electron method, also called the half-reaction method (Section 6.3.2), which balances the oxidation part and the reduction part of the reaction completely separately, as two self-contained half equations, before adding the …