Professor Tellings is a nice guy and will help you if you go to his office hours. Lectures are dry and he literally just reads out of the book. However it is nice to attend them as you can see how he parses sentences which can help you with your own parsing.

As far as the class itself goes, there are weekly homeworks that take 3-6 hours each if you want to get a decent grade on them. The midterm was difficult, but the final was a bit easier. He also had us do these simple one question quizes each week which was his way of taking attendance. They are easy, but also easy to forget and make up a good portion of your grade, so make sure you do them.

Terrible teacher, really hard to understand him and not clear with his explanations

This was an awesome class. If you like puzzles, then syntax is definitely the field for you.

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Workload:
-Weekly Quizzes. You have 2 minutes to answer one question. The questions are usually taken directly from lecture. Your lowest score is dropped.It says on the syllabus that they're 15% of your grade, but I only took 4 out of the 8 and still got an A in the class.
-Weekly Homeworks. Drawing syntax trees and answering general syntax questions. The book explains the topics really well, and the prof. posts his notes from lecture on CCLE, so the answers could be deduced from there + the book. He also tolerates lateness n these, with 10% off for the first day it's late, 20% off on the second day, and so on.
-Weekly readings. They're not mandatory, but the book is super easy to understand and sometimes does a better job of explaining things than Prof. Tellings does, so I highly recommend those.

Exams:
-You get to bring a full sized sheet of paper, front and back, with as many notes as you can fit on it.
-If you do the homeworks well, and take time on your study sheet, the exams should be a piece of cake. Go to lecture and copy down the trees that Prof. Tellings draws on the board, and you can put those on your sheet for reference on the test. It's super helpful.

Participation:
-Attending discussion or lecture isn't mandatory, but the lectures definitely help with the quizzes, and my TA would pass out these handouts at discussion that basically summarized everything we had learned for the week clearly and concisely. They were super helpful.