The Electric Field Is a Vector Field

In practice, we don't have to calculate the electric field for each charge individually. We can sort of use these simplifying rules to just calculate it for this clump of charge and this clumps of charge over here and so on. But conceptually, each charge does produce its own contribution to the electric field. And remember, it's very important to emphasize these test charges that we are imagining, the positive chest charges, they are purely imaginary. So they don't actually exist. If they did actually exist, we would have to then work out their own contribution because any charge has its own electric field.