Why do you draw bent lines for skeletal structures instead of straight lines?

Question

Thinking because you have to distinguish when a Carbon atom is there or not but why bent lines specificially?

In: 3

Answer 1

Because there is an actual bond angle there. If it is perfectly tetrahedral the angle is 109.5 degrees (to a reasonable number of sig figs anyway). The angle is meant to reflect that. Obviously there will be some variation in actual bond angle due to steric effects from whatever the various substituents might be, but we use an approximation for modeling purposes.