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My name is Vande Walle. I am a professor of
competition law at the University of Tokyo
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and I want to give some tips on how to improve
your presentation skills in English.
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Presentation skills are important. They are important in academia. They are important everywhere,
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in daily life, in any career. Essentially,
there are only two ways to share our research, right?
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In writing or orally. Probably writing
is even more important. If you have a good
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article and you get it published as an academic
probably that's really the most important. But,
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at least in my experience, to get there, to get to
this good article, you need to present it because
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presenting it is really the first step towards a
great article. You get feedback; you get comments;
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you get criticism; you can improve your article
and that gets you a great article that that will
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get published. Also, if you want to continue your
career in academia you're going to have to teach
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and for teaching you need presentation skills.
If you do another career, outside of academia,
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you'll also need presentation skills. I have
a lot of friends in companies who say "I have
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these great ideas but my colleague gets all the
credit for it because my colleague presents and
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my colleague is really good at meetings and
explaining and so everyone thinks he is the
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one who has all the good ideas but in fact it is
me. So there is a lot of frustration if you're not
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good at presenting. Why is presenting in English
important? Well, whether we like it or not English
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is the common language used at international
conferences. If we have international students
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we need to teach them in English. Will that
change in the future? Maybe AI is getting better
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and automated translation is getting better.
This is just part of Microsoft PowerPoint, this
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automated translation function. If you want, I
can show you later. Just click one button and
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you have these subtitles. They are pretty
good but they change all the time because
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as my sentence changes, the translation also
changes. So I guess I have to speak really
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slowly and then the translations
and the subtitles make some
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sense. But let me put them off because they
are more a distraction than anything else.
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For my students, my Japanese students, I put
the English subtitles on and they are pretty
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good because there the sentence doesn't change. It
just gives what I say and for certain words like,
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incongruous, or something, people go "what?" and don't understand
it orally but if they see it on the slide in
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English then they understand it. So that is a
helpful function. Now presenting is important
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but we all, including myself, we all dread it, we
all fear it. There are a lot of surveys on this
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and they show that people fear public speaking
about as much or more than snakes or poisonous
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spiders or heights or all kinds of things. There
is this famous comedian, a U.S. comedian, and he has this
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very famous line. So he saw these surveys and the
number one fear is public speaking and the number
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two is death. So people fear public speaking more
than death and then he said well that means to
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the average person if you have to be at a funeral
you would rather be in the casket than doing the
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eulogy. You would be rather dead in the box than
having to speak about the person who is dead. So
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we all fear it but maybe with these tips and by
practicing - we'll have a second part today where
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I hope we can practice - it gets better and it
does get better. I think it's still difficult,
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especially when I have to speak in a language
I'm not comfortable in, like Japanese, but it gets
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better with time. So don't worry if you don't like
it or you fear it, it does get better over time.
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But the only way it gets better is by practicing
and trying. Now, before you say "professor that's
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easy for you to say, you're almost native or
something." Well, let me explain a little bit
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about my own background because I think there
are two counterarguments to that point that oh
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it's easy for you. First of all, English is not
my native language. It is not even the second
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language I learned. I am from Belgium. It is a
small country between France and the Netherlands
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and Germany. Although it is small there's quite
a lot of languages spoken there. There are three
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official languages: Dutch French German. The
yellow part is where Dutch is spoken and I was
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born in the yellow part so I went to school in
Dutch, my university education, law school was
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in Dutch and my second language was French because
in school at around six or seven years of age we
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learned French. English was the third language
I was taught and I was about 12 years old when
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I had my first English class in high school,
two hours per week, so much less than Japanese students.
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But still probably it would be a lie
to say that I'm 英語が苦手の人, you know someone who
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doesn't like or who has no affinity for English.
It is true I've always loved English and it's not
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through school that I learned it I learned it
through movies through TV through music. I was
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lucky to have parents who had a lot of friends
from abroad and when they came, they spoke
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English. Traveling made me speak in English. When
I grew up the internet was starting up. We called
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it "the internet", it was just like one thing, the
internet and I would I remember going on a chat
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box that was something new like you could chat
with someone from America and we were like wow
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and that that was a way for me to practice English
and writing and chatting using the internet. Books
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as well. So I guess I learned English more in a
natural way rather than really through school.
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But how about Japanese? I think my struggle with
Japanese is very similar to the struggle many
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Japanese students face with English. It doesn't
come as naturally. Because English comes naturally
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to me because my native tongue is Dutch and they
are part of the same family. It is called the West
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Germanic language family. It has German, Dutch,
English, they are all related, they are a family of
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languages. Japanese is a totally different thing
and so I spent a lot of time trying to study
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Japanese. I started in high school. I lived half a
year in Japan in in Kyoto in high school and that
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was the first time I studied some Japanese
and it went pretty quickly but still I mean
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okay hiragana, katakana some kanji and some basic
conversation.It is not like that makes you fluent, right?
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So even a semester in high school it's
nothing. And then many many years after that
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while I did my LL.M. in Japan, when I did my PhD
in Japan, I studied Japanese on the side. I still
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think my Japanese is not fluent, not really. I
don't think I can be a great speaker in Japanese.
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I think to be a great speaker in Japanese if
you're from Europe or from the US the only way
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is to either at a really young age spend three or
four years in Japan or when you're in university
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focus on Japanese language so in other words don't
study law but study Japanese language. Those are
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the people who speak really fluent Japanese. If,
like me, you study law and on the side after your
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law classes you study some Japanese you get to
my level which is kind of okay, I guess, but it's
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not really going to make me a great speaker and I
think a lot of my Japanese students face the same
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problem. They are very smart and they have talent
for language but the distance between Japanese and
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English is just so big that they have to put so
much time to reach a good level and they reach
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a good level but to really reach this kind of
total natural fluency it's extremely extremely
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difficult. But that's okay, right? I mean language
is a tool to share our research we don't need to
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be stars and we don't need to be the best speaker
at the conference. We need to be able to share our
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ideas and our research and that's enough. So that
is how I comfort myself when I struggle with my
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Japanese and I have to prepare a presentation in
Japanese. I am always very nervous but at least
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my idea somehow is conveyed, is transmitted and
that is the ultimate goal. So, all right, some tips.
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The first three minutes of your presentation are
the most important. That is when the audience
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looking at you kind of decides what they are
going to do the rest of the presentation. Whether
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they are going to check their email or their
Facebook and kind of listen with a half ear,
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or whether they are really going to focus on
what you say. So whenever you prepare your
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presentation make sure you think well about those
first three minutes what are you going to say
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in those first three minutes. Personally I don't
like very much presentations that start with "my
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name is Vande Walle and I'm going to talk
about competition law and Big Tech and how
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we can assess whether competition law has
adequately dealt with Big Tech".
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I don't think that is a good intro, that's not a good
start. I think if you give that start a lot of
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the audience sights and they they check their
email or they're not really interested anymore you
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have to capture the audience from the beginning
that's when the whole audience is still attentive
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and awake the first few minutes after that they
get a bit sleepy even if your talk is interesting
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they'll get a bit sleepy so your your impression
and what people remember from your presentation
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will be most determined by those four first three
minutes. So rather than saying what I just said I
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would try to put it in in this way. f
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For instance,
put it as a question: how has competition law dealt with Big Tech? and has it done enough? That is the topic of my presentation today. So I just
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said the same thing but I said it as a question and to me it's more engaging because the audience
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is like yeah okay interesting question I also
wonder and they will listen more.
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Another way is an anecdote or a story. A lot of people
will tell you: storytelling is important. Humans
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love stories. Humans don't like bullet points. As
a kid we love stories and we still love stories so
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if you can start with a story that's great. Not
always possible I find certainly in law where we
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have sometimes very technical things to present
it's not always possible to start with a story
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but it's very successful if you can do it. These
are all the great Ted presentations. 30% start
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with a story but it's not always easy. Maybe for
this one: I woke up I checked my messages ... Apple
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someone ran my doorbell ...Amazon I I came to campus
checked my mail ... Microsoft and then had a meeting
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with the dean ... Apple. So from this morning until now I've spent most of my time using the
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services of Big Tech. These companies have huge
power in our daily life. Maybe that would be a
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story right? So that would also be a way to start the presentation.
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A statement or a surprising fact that can also work. "On average we spend more than five hours per day using the services of Big Tech" If you start with with that as first sentence that
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can kind of catch people. Or: what
will the audience get from this presentation?
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that is also of course a very good way to start the presentation. That is my first tip.
