The phrase "a preliminary effort to" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing an initial attempt or action taken to achieve a specific goal or outcome.
Example: "The team launched a preliminary effort to assess the feasibility of the new project before committing significant resources."
Alternatives: "an initial attempt to" or "a first step towards".
Rival Afghan opposition groups meet this morning in Germany in a preliminary effort to fashion a unified government.
We seem to gloss over the fact that these players voted to re-open a collectively bargained agreement in a preliminary effort to address the drug problem.
The decision represented only a preliminary effort to define public employees' Fourth Amendment rights in the digital era, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the court, took pains to say that it was narrow and closely tied to the facts.
Although most Christian, as well as Islamic and Jewish, theologians tended to consider the question of whether natural religion gives insight into God's nature treating religion as a relation to the first cause of the universe the English philosopher Roger Bacon (c. 1220 c. 1292) preferred to categorize the various manifest kinds of religion as a preliminary effort to establishing a true theology.
This study was a preliminary effort to apply this methodology, and the results are only theoretical estimations.
This paper is a preliminary effort to elucidate the concept of community-based entrepreneurial activities based on evidences from a case.
"This was a preliminary effort at the request of the union to understand the facts," said Ell, adding that he was acting as a lawyer for the union.
Yet, despite their pioneering effort and the fact that the industry has been consulted in the process, some bankers are already criticizing CFPB's preliminary effort to make a bad system better.
However, our preliminary effort to rescue this cardiac phenotype by expressing VEGFR/PVR in hemocytes in developing embryos was not successful (T.N.S., unpublished result).
This report describes preliminary efforts to implement a computer-based application, called Zora, in a pediatric hemodialysis unit.
Our preliminary efforts to obtain an inventory of the cotton phytochrome gene family (based largely on 'hinge' region) indicated that diploid A- and D-genome diploid cottons have two paralogous PHYA genes (designated PHYA1 and PHYA2), and one each of PHYB, PHYC, and PHYE gene sub-families.
