The phrase "a certain tendency" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing a specific inclination or pattern observed in behavior, trends, or phenomena.
Example: "In recent years, there has been a certain tendency among consumers to prefer sustainable products over conventional ones."
Alternatives: "a particular inclination" or "a specific trend".
Truffaut would then write a groundbreaking Cahiers article in 1953 enigmatically titled "A Certain Tendency Of The French Cinema," which laid out what became known as "the auteur theory".
His published works show a certain tendency toward repetition.
It's become a tiresome cliche that "all Australian films are depressing" – a dig at a certain tendency towards social realism.
We suggest that the regional entities of the European Neolithic maintain strong alliances and a certain tendency towards symbolic globalization.
But we might recognize in its essential logic a certain tendency to transform political conflicts into matters of biological hostility.
There is a certain tendency towards agreement, towards saying all right, let's live together, our security alone can never be secure if your security isn't also guaranteed.
"They're looking much more into the future than into the past," Rivers says of his films, admitting to a certain apocalyptic tendency.
There is a certain familial tendency, half the cases occurring in families in which one or several relatives have the same condition.
The issue of brute integrity is not just an outcome of a certain cultural tendency to speak plainly and bluntly, nor is it wholly explainable in terms of our assumptions about authority and hierarchy and the relationships between bosses and subordinates.
But in my experience, the Spalding vigilante discipline dispenser is typical of a certain British tendency to be intolerant of children: children can sometimes be treated like a peculiar caste of creature all to themselves, permitted to exist in ordinary human spaces as long as they don't draw attention to themselves by doing anything ‚ well, childish.
Which one is inherently more free?" Mr. Rushdie wasn't sure how to answer that one, but in response to other questions, he lamented both a certain human tendency to value material well-being over intellectual freedom, China perhaps being the prime example, and the headlong flight of post-Communist societies to intellectual pap.
