Walk with vacuous nitwit is quite grating (8)

I believe the answer is:

strident

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'quite grating' is the definition.
'strident' can be an answer for 'grating' (I've seen this before). I'm not certain of the 'quite' bit.

'walk with vacuous nitwit' is the wordplay.
'walk' becomes 'stride' (stride can mean to walk around).
'with' means one lot of letters go next to another.
'vacuous' means to remove the middle letters.
'nitwit' with its middle taken out is 'nt'.
'stride'+'nt'='STRIDENT'

'is' acts as a link.

Can you help me to learn more?

(Other definitions for strident that I've seen before include "Unpleasantly loud and harsh" , "Tumultuous" , "Unpleasantly rough" , "Loudly assertive" , "harsh sound" .)

I've seen this clue in The Irish Times.

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