In this article, we focus on writing in German as a foreign language in a Swedish upper secondary school (course 4). Texts from 18 Swedish learners of German (level A2 ̶ B1) working with process oriented writing for three months were analysed. Our study is mainly guided by the following questions: How does the analysis method affect the assessment of a text regarding text quality? To what extent do different analysis methods give a fair picture of the quality in learner texts? In this study, we compare the result from an error analysis of different linguistic categories with an analysis concerning syntactic complexity. Syntactic complexity is measured in two different ways; Firstly, a learner profile based on Grießhaber’s categories was conducted. Secondly, the total amount of complex sentences (correct as well as incorrect) containing sub- and coordination, and the total amount of correct clauses was investigated. These variables were related to text length. Our study shows that different analysis methods lead to diverging results. No correlations were found between text length and measures of syntactic complexity and accuracy.