About Us
Wordstar is owned, operated and managed by Rod Taylor. Rod has an MBA from the University of Cape Town and a B.Sc. in chemistry from the University of London.
He also holds Toastmasters International’s highest awards in Communication and Leadership and is a certified Practitioner in Neuro-linguistic Programming Rod was the CEO of Direction Training for eight years before branching out to start Wordstar as an adjunct to Direction Training in 1999.
Prior to that, he had more than twenty years’ experience in line management in the process and manufacturing industries from shop floor to board level, and from technical to marketing.
Apart from his professional life, Rod has watched the aurora from a tent on the glaciers of Iceland at forty below zero, seen the Great Geysir blow scalding water 65m into the air, bathed in hot springs next to the ice, walked much of the Alps in France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, explored the Drakensberg from end to end and been stranded on the summit for two days by a blizzard. He has been through the white waters of the Orange River in a canoe.
He has won three National speech contests, and was Toastmasters’ Chief Judge for the ten English-speaking countries in Southern Africa for nine years. He has been awarded the prestigious Toastmaster of the Year award for Southern Africa. In addition to his English language skills, Rod is highly regarded for his expertise in communication and is a popular presenter and speaker.
Rod has broad and extensive experience in the editing of dissertations, theses and technical papers. He also works with authors on books as well as proposals, reports, magazine copy, websites, brochures, newsletters, questionnaires. He has published various technical articles on Aluminium alloys.
Many years of experience have shown that relatively few people have the language skills to recognise incorrect language use but, to those that do, poor spelling, punctuation and grammar give a bad impression of the competence of the company or organisation concerned. There are differences of opinion among marketing experts as to how much influence (if any) such impressions have on the corporate bottom line, but why take the risk when Wordstar can ensure that your documents, posters, signage, brochures, advertisements and the like are written in good English? Academics and creative people produce wonderful ideas in addition to their dissertations, theses, technical articles and the like but, sadly, not all of them have good English language skills and the effect of the creativity may be marred by poor spelling, grammar, etc.