"Open Canoe Mistakes" Review By Dylan Maltais

Author of Article: Doug Wipper
Article Name: Open Canoe Mistakes
Link to Article: http://www.paddling.net/guidelines/showArticle.html?52
Reviewer: Dylan Maltais
Date of Submission: 2016-05-05

"Open Canoe Mistakes" 

Review

    

    White water canoeing can be a great activity for people of all ages and athletic abilities if it is done safely, this article does an okay job at explaining various strategies that can improve your white water canoeing experience. This article was published by a teacher at a white water canoeing school and it covers "11 common whitewater mistakes". Although this article is quite short in length, it does have some very decent information, but this is not a perfect article. 

    This article is by no means "perfect" and in my personal opinion it is barely decent. The reason behind this is: first of all I found this article by doing a Google search for "white water canoeing basics" and seeing as this article was the first article that appeared I assumed it would be just that. Wrong! This article does cover 11 steps that could definitely improve your paddling the problem for me is that I am not an experienced paddler and the vocabulary used in this article was not written with basic paddling vocabulary. Throughout my short amount of time reading this article I spent more time looking up words that I didn't understand and I would not consider myself as an inexperienced paddler because I have been paddling multiple times including during a summer camp. Another problem with this article was the miss use of the word "are" at the end of the second intro paragraph leading into the 11 common mistakes, which isn't a huge deal, but at the same time it made me think about how much effort was really put into this article. 

     I chose this article because I thought it would be very relevant to the outdoor ed class as a whole and also it could be an interesting article I could share with the class preceding our own canoe trip. After reading this article I would not do that, it was just too difficult to understand and not written very well. Although this article was not well written it did still have some important information for beginner paddlers that are trying to improve their skills. 

    If I were to rate this article out of 10 I would give it a 6.5, I think I have clearly pointed out the many flaws of this article and honestly it was a disappointing after finding that this article was published on the website www.paddling.net where you would assume there would be good paddling information. I would not recommend anyone read this article because it is border line a waste of time to read and instead do what I should have done and just spend more time looking for a more well-written, more informative article. 

Sources: White Water Canoe Mistakes | How to Articles - paddling.net | Retreived May 5th, 2016 from http://www.paddling.net/guidelines/showArticle.html?52