Reddit mentions of Introducing Linguistics: A Graphic Guide

Sorry for the delayed response! The professor that helped me the most in terms of career was Dr. Kristen Syrett. I was a research assistant in her laboratory. All of the profs are great. Dr. Ken Safir is another person who helped me. There are a few others, but a few have moved to different universities. If you take profs multiple times for different courses and get yourself involved in any of their research, they really get to know you and will be great resources. The department is really pretty small, so it sorta becomes a nice tight-nit linguistics family.

My current career is as a school administrator where I supervise bilingual programs and design ESL curriculum. I do love what I do. I chose an applied linguistics route, so I use a lot of what I learned studying language acquisition in curriculum decisions. Other linguistics grads from my cohort either work for companies like Google as computational linguists, or are doing post-doctoral work related to the field.

As for how I got interested in linguistics, when I was in high school, my school's library had a "graphic novel" type book called Introducing Linguistics by R.L. Trask. It was a short read, but it made me think about how much I don't know about language and how it works and I decided to take it as my college major. Coming into my education-related job was a development that came later on when studying language acquisition and language pedagogical theory.

If you want something cute and not too heavy, there is a pretty nice Graphic Guide to linguistics. It won't be as technical, of course, but it will get the ideas across.

The Dummies book is also decent, surprisingly, from the quick glances I've taken through it. Though I don't think it does a good job covering many theories in syntax, that shouldn't be too much of your focus anyway if you just want gist.

Beyond this, any basic textbook will do. Fromkin et al is a popular one, though I don't think I can comment on a 'best.' Buy an older edition of one for a couple of bucks and ask questions on here when you feel stuck.