In organic chemistry, how can functional groups be easily identified and how can I memorise organic mechanisms?

For both As and A-level, knowing functional groups for organic chemistry is essential. The easiest way to identify functional groups is to understand which bonds are characteristic for the functional group. You should get a hand out from your A level chemistry teacher at college which will include all the functional groups you will need to know for your syllabus; you can use these sheet as your first reference point for learning and revising the groups. A good technique is to go through this hand out and highlight the essential bonds that you will be looking out for in an organic molecule when trying to identify a functional group. To further your learning of these groups, consider creating flash cards which hold information about the functional group structure, the name of the functional group, any prefix or suffix for molecules which contain the functional group, and a few examples of molecule that you can test yourself on. Organic Mechanisms are also essential and quite confusing as there are so many of them. The best way to memorise them in my opinion is to see the big picture. This can easily be done by creating a map of all the organic reactions, on A3 or A2 paper, which shows which products are the result of a reaction with an other organic molecule. By this I mean, mapping the progression from alcohol to aldehyde to craboxylic acid, After you have mapped the progression of all the reactions you need to know, you can write out the mechanism on the arrows going from the reactants to the products. This is a really good revision tool as you can also add in detail about conditions and reagents needed for each of the reactions- its a great way to summarise all the information needed for the organic aspect of chemistry.