As you progress through Organic Chemistry, mechanisms become very important to help us understand what is happening to the electrons in organic reactions. As with many of the skills that you learn in chemistry, you learn them so that you can predict outcomes in new situations.
If you have read our primer on Reactions Kinetics, you will know that organic mechanisms were developed from rates experiments. An organic mechanism shows the steps that a reaction follows as the reactants in the overall equation become products. In many cases, reactions do not take place in a single step.
If you are currently just starting out in organic chemistry, you may not have covered some advanced reaction kinetics and so the fact that many reactions take place in multiple steps may be new to you.
You can download our PDF on curly brackets in organic chemistry from https://cramnow.com/lessons/organic-chemistry/curly-arrows-in-organic-chemistry