Viele Wissensarbeiter verdienen ihre Brötchen mit dem Schreiben von Texten. Diese lassen sich inzwischen recht gut automatisch auf Rechtschreibung und Grammatik überprüfen. Aber lässt sich auch ihre Lesbarkeit testen? Die Verfechter des so genannten Flesch-Tests behaupten genau dies.

There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech—not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary—six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam—that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, which re-enclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens with pens; finally, all the parentheses and re-parentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it—after which comes the verb, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb—merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out,—the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. (Mark Twain: The awful German language, 1880)

Mark Twain bringt in seiner satirischen Zuspitzung eine Eigenschaft des Deutschen wunderbar auf den Punkt: Weiterlesen →