そこで、文の中に盛り込む情報に優先順位＝priority をつけることが必要となってきます。与えられた情報の中で１番大事な情報、あるいは、書き手が１番伝えたい情報は何か、を決める必要がでてきます。２パラグラフ・サマリーでは、この、書き手が１番伝えたい情報を最初のパラグラフに、それを補足する情報を２番目のパラグラフに盛り込む形になります。
例文④―２パラグラフの場合
Company A made a new profit record last year in its 154-year-old history.
Strong sales of the company’s new program, Business English Reading, pushed up net income by 63 percent last year to 3.54 billion yen. The English program started in April.
これならば、最初のパラグラフの文も、２番目のパラグラフの文もすっきりして読みやすい形になっています。２番目のパラグラフは２つの文に分けて、１番目のパラグラフで述べたことを補足する形になっています。他の情報、つまり、「Business English Reading」の売り上げや、2005年の最高益などの情報は、３番目のパラグラフを作ってその中に入れればいいわけです。さらに言えばもう１つ、４番目のパラグラフを作って、今度はそこに、最近の日本での英語学習者の増加の様子を書きいれれば、立派な４つのパラグラフの文章の完成です。
英文ライティングではよく、文全体の構成を逆三角形のフォームにするよう言われます。これはすなわち、文の中に書き入れる情報にpriority をつけることに他なりません。
始めの文には、書き手が１番伝えたいことを、２番目の文には、それを補足する情報を、３番目や４番目の文には、１番目・２番目の文で書かれた情報のさらに副次情報を付け加えます。エグゼクティブ・サマリーなど、何かを説明する場合には箇条書きの項目などが使われることもありますが、基本はこの考え方と変わりありません。
以上述べた点を踏まえて、下の英文を２パラグラフにサマリーしてみてください。トピックは日銀の追加金融緩和策です。金融業界の方には馴染みのある話だと思います。先月中旬にアメリカの追加金融緩和策（ＱＥ３）を受けての日銀の決定についての記事です。ちなみに、「asset purchase」とは、日銀などの中央銀行が国債などを買い入れる施策のことを指します。
The Bold BoJ stimulus takes Japan’s finance minister by surprise
20 September 2012
By Ben McLannahan in Tokyo and Alice Ross and Claire Jones in London, Source: Newspaperword count:349
The Bank of Japan has launched a fresh round of monetary stimulus, echoing the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank by warning that slowing growth at home was being compounded by “deceleration” elsewhere.
The bolder than expected move - aimed in large part at counteracting the yen’s gains against the dollar since the launch last week of the Fed’s QE3 asset purchase programme - caught analysts and even Japan’s finance minister by surprise.
“The BoJ took more action than we anticipated,” Jun Azumi, finance minister, said after the announcement.
But its effect on the yen proved shortlived. The Japanese currency initially hit its weakest level in four weeks but by the close of London markets had clawed back all its losses against the dollar.
The BoJ said it would increase the size of its asset-purchasing programme to a total of Y80tn ($1.02tn) by buying another Y10tn of government bonds, with the deadline for those purchases pushed back from June 2013 to the end of next year.
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s decision last week to launch another multibillion-dollar round of asset purchases to revive the US economy had thrown a spotlight on his Japanese counterpart, Masaaki Shirakawa, to act in order to counter the yen’s gains against the dollar.
Even so, most observers had expected the relatively conservative BoJ governor to hold off from easing measures until the end of October, when the bank updates its semi-annual forecasts on growth and inflation.
In a further surprise decision, the BoJ scrapped its minimum 0.1 per cent bidding yield for buying Japanese government and corporate bonds, making it easier to hit its targets.
Mr Shirakawa had appeared to rule out such a move last month when he said he was “not thinking” of doing so.
“The BoJ has finally admitted that its assessment of the economy had been too optimistic,” said Atsushi Mizuno, a BoJ board member between 2004 and 2009, and now a vice-chairman at Credit Suisse in Tokyo. “The market was pushing hard; it’s a good thing that they responded.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012
(c) 2012 The Financial Times Limited
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