Proper way to write a Lewis Dot Diagram

Chem quiz tomorrow. & my teacher constantly fails to assist me when I ask for help. "Look it up in the book"... hopefully someone can give me a better explanation.

I know the second ring of the atom can only have 8 electrons but is there a specific way the dots should be placed, a certain order? I'm lost.

ex: Na (11 electrons) how would I write a Lewis dot diagram for that element?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks! : )

In Lewis Dot diagrams, you only draw the valence electrons. Sodium has 11 electrons, but only one of them is a valence electron. If you look at the periodic table, the group number will help you decide how many valence electrons you need, but it has to do with the spatial arrangement of electrons. Electrons repel each other because they are negatively charged, so this is pretty much the reason for the different orbitals. So in sodium, there are likely to be 2 electrons in the 1s orbital, 2 electrons in the 2s orbital, 2 electrons in each of the three 2p orbitals, and one electron in the 3s orbital (I say likely because in Lewis structures you assume everything is in the ground state. Electrons with a lot of energy are going to go to higher level shells because they'll move faster and farther, but no one really cares about this unless they're studying lifetimes and fluorospectroscopy or maybe quantum mechanics). The first and second shell are completely filled, but the third shell only has one electron. That's the one you draw.

It doesn't really matter where you put the dots. Technically the first two would go on the same side and then an electron would go into each of the three p orbitals, but as long as you don't have more than two electrons on any side of the atomic symbol your teacher shouldn't mark off. For carbonyls we even put the two lone pairs diagonal off of oxygen. (A carbonyl is an oxygen atom double-bonded to an O atom)