Ten years ago, David Foster Wallace admitted in “Tense Present,” one of his best and most charming essays, to being a “SNOOT,” which he defined as a “really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire’s column’s prose itself.” He outed himself while writing in Harper’s on Bryan A. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a book, he says, that serves to confirm its author’s “SNOOTitude while undercutting it in tone.”

Ultimately, though, “Tense Present” is as much about Wallace’s own rhetorical postures as about Garner’s, so much so that Wallace might as well be talking about himself. Garner’s book is “so good and so sneaky,” Wallace contends, because it relies on a “subtle rhetorical strategy.” Its “Ethical Appeal” amounts to “a complex and sophisticated ‘Trust me,’ ” one that “requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his intellectual acuity or technical competence, but of his basic decency and fairness and sensitivity to the audience’s own hopes and fears.”

Wallace, too, strived to make ethical arguments while soothing and flattering his readers and distracting them from the fact that arguments were being made. He was inarguably one of the most interesting thinkers and distinctive stylists of the generation raised on Jacques Derrida, Strunk and White and Scooby-Doo, and his nonfiction writings, on subjects as diverse as cruises, porn, tennis and eating lobster, are a compelling, often dizzying mix of arguments and asides, of reportage and personal anecdotes, of high diction (“pleonasm”), childlike speech (“plus, worse”), slacker lingo (“totally hosed”) and legalese (“what this article hereby terms a ‘Democratic Spirit’ ”), often within the course of a single paragraph. As John Jeremiah Sullivan astutely observed in GQ, Wallace repudiated the demands of “the well-tempered magazine feature,” which “seeks to make you forget its problems, half-truths and arbitrary decisions.” Yet Wallace’s rhetoric is mannered and limited in its own way, as manipulative in its recursive self-second-guessing as any more straightforward effort to persuade.

Geoff Dyer, an essayist as idiosyncratic and perceptive as Wallace but far more economical, confessed recently in Prospect magazine that he “break[s] out in a mental rash” when forced to read Wallace. “It’s not that I dislike the extravagance, the excess, the beanie-baroque, the phat loquacity,” Dyer wrote. “They just bug the crap out of me. ” Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like “sort of” and “pretty much” and sincerity-infusers like “really.” An icon of porn publishing described in the essay “Big Red Son,” for example, is “hard not to sort of almost actually like.” Within a brief excerpt from that piece in The New York Times Book Review, Wallace speaks of “the whole cynical postmodern deal” and “the whole mainstream celebrity culture,” and concludes that “the whole thing sucks.” Nor is this an unrepresentative sample; “whole” appears 20 times in the essay, so frequently that it begins to seem not just sloppy and imprecise but argumentatively, even aggressively, disingenuous. At their worst these verbal tics make it impossible to evaluate his analysis; I’m constantly wishing he would either choose a more straightforward way to limit his contentions or fully commit to one of them.