The phrase "a flawed effort" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe an attempt or endeavor that has shortcomings or imperfections.
Example: "Despite the team's dedication, the project was ultimately deemed a flawed effort due to several critical oversights."
Alternatives: "an imperfect attempt" or "a misguided endeavor."
But that proposal was rejected as a flawed effort to get the government back into the regulation of pay television, a market that officials have tried to deregulate.
Offering the prosecutors' first detailed account of the Algerians' frantic efforts to carry out their operation, Mr. Haineault drew a picture of a flawed effort.
AT&T Wireless decided last year to get out of the fixed wireless business after accumulating about $1.3 billion in charges from Project Angel, a flawed effort to provide fast wireless Internet connections.
Re "No Door-to-Door in This Census; Volunteers Outnumber Subjects in Homeless Count" (news article, Feb. 26): We volunteers went ahead with what some of us viewed as a flawed effort because of what it signified, not because of what it accomplished.
Columbia University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who has given his opinion on such matters as the multibillion-dollar plan to restore Florida's Everglades (a flawed effort, in his view), sums up what many of his colleagues feel: "I have a moral responsibility as a citizen to make people aware of what the science means".
While the opera featured some lovely performances — including the mezzo-sopranos Susan Graham as the sporty Jordan Baker and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, in her house debut, as an earthy, ill-fated Myrtle Wilson — it seemed more a noble, flawed effort than a prime candidate for the repertory.
In 2006 the Whitney Museum — of American Art, mind you — pulled it off with "Picasso and American Art," a somewhat flawed effort that examined his influence on a host of major and minor American artists.
Paper, $11. HERE is a noble, flawed effort to deepen our American understanding of war by making facts personal.
This project, also called "Be Kind Rewind," is a serious but flawed effort to carry over into the real world the film's idealistic, anti-commercial fantasy of do-it-yourself creativity.
Critics portrayed the speeches as a coordinated effort to hide a flawed postwar effort.
The (still chair-less) inquiry is now on the verge of collapse, though many see even that flawed effort as a step in the right direction.
