The phrase "a defining influence" is correct and usable in written English.
It is used to refer to something that significantly affects the outcome or character of something else. For example, "The music of John Coltrane had a defining influence on the jazz of the 1960s."
Mr. le Carre's childhood was a defining influence on his life.
But his catalog also includes light-spirited works like this curtain-raiser, in which early jazz, particularly ragtime, is a defining influence.
It is, instead, the conservative legal establishment in the catbird seat, enjoying, more than at any time since the nineteen-twenties, a defining influence on the law.
Turner and the multitude of later historians who were influenced by him saw the frontier as having had a defining influence in creating certain American intellectual traits.
To a foreign eye, the lightness and simplicity of Nendo's work evokes the minimalist tradition of Japanese design, which dates to the late 1400s and was a defining influence on Western Modernism.
These giants of Romanticism, who created a unique literary form that had a defining influence on German art and politics throughout the nineteenth century, were contemporaries of Froebel and famed in their own time.
However the variation in the initial sample mass and the particle size does not seem to exert a defined influence in the yield of the different phases.
However, the variation of the initial sample mass and the particle size do not exert a defined influence in the yield of the three phases.
This level includes (i) the identification of project objectives and stakeholder concerns, project budgeting and scheduling, and construction impacts assessments and (ii) detailed traffic and performance analysis including traffic, environmental and other impacts analysis on adjacent intersections, roadways, and surrounding communities within a defined influence area.
But sometimes the specifics of them; the magic that lies deep in a country's history, a belief in the supernatural that is widely accepted or a geographically defining influence, such as the role the sea or mountains, mean that though the origins of the story fade, they never die completely.
For me, there has been nothing more important in my life – or a more defining influence on my life – than my family.
