Textanalysen, Textproduktionen - Why plural?

Question

The introduction of the passage:

Schriftliche Textanalysen und Textproduktionen sind ein entscheidender und doch inzwischen häufig vernachlässigter Teil des Spracherwerbs.

Later in the passage:

Leider wird die Textanalyse inzwischen aus Zeitgründen oft hintangestellt, um automatisierten Prüfungsmethoden wie z. B. Multiple-Choice-Aufgaben Platz zu machen. Das Plädoyer für die Textanalyse ist eindeutig eines für die allein auf das eigene Wissen beschränkte Äußerung.

At first I try to google the term Textanalysen and Textproduktionen, but those plural forms don't show up very often, even this happens. With regard to the first sentence above, is the sentence semantically or grammatically incorrect? Because I couldn't really find out why one would use such nouns in plural, and then in the rest of the passage only the singular forms of the two are used.

Answer 1

With regard to the first sentence above, is the sentence semantically or grammatically incorrect?

No, the sentence - in fact both sentences - are correct. Correct not only in a grammatical but also semantic sense.

The words are probably hard to find because German creates compounds on the fly. "Textanalysen" = *analyses of text(s)", "Textproduktionen" = productions of text(s) (basically, the last means what american pupils would call "creative writing").

Because I couldn't really find out why one would use such nouns in plural, and then in the rest of the passage only the singular forms of the two are used.

There is a small but important difference in meaning and German is in this respect quite similar to English. The singular denotes the activity itself. i.e:

In der Textanalyse ist es wichtig ...
_{In text analysis it is important to ...}

The plural is used when not the activity but acts of the activity are talked about. i.e:

In der Textanalyse ist es wichtig, präzise zu sein und in dieser Hinsicht sind deine Textanalysen besser als seine.
_{In text analysis it is important [singular, up to here we talk about the activity] to be precise and in this respect your text analyses are [plural, because we talk about (several) individual acts] better than his.}

Answer 2

The first sentence is correct and can be said like that. I don't know exactly why it is plural, but I believe it is either because there could be multiple variants of "Textanalysen" or because you will most likely do it multiple times. But as a German speaker, the plural just sounds correct while it would sound weird in the singular. You could use singular in a sentence like this:

Die Textanalyse ist ein wichtiger Teil des Spracherwerbs.