So I’m dipping my toe again in the swift waters of journalism. It’s been a while since I wrote a metro column for the St. Petersburg Times, covering Tampa Bay, delighting plenty of readers and irking the daylights out of plenty of others. Since then I’ve been immersed in a different sort of education than you get on the street and on election night--I’ve been back to school and have a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from the University of South Florida. Now I’m studying linguistics. Knowing linguistics is a useful skill for somebody who tutors writing, as I do. But I’ll tell you this—if you want to learn the basics of putting words well on a page, get a job at what’s left of newspapers, and you’ll learn bloody fast.