The phrase "an effort to comprehend" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing attempts to understand something, whether it be a concept, situation, or piece of information.
Example: "The researchers made an effort to comprehend the complex behavior of the species in their natural habitat."
Alternatives: "a attempt to understand" or "an endeavor to grasp".
An experimental investigation was carried out in an effort to comprehend the behavior of a bridge girder consisting of a steel tube filled with reinforced concrete and made composite with an overlying concrete deck.
The players have turned to religion in an effort to comprehend their good fortune.
In an effort to comprehend a new trend in merchandising, the writer feels a kinship to Desiretta.
Chris Grace and his family now research the wants and needs of food-obsessed consumers, and, in an effort to comprehend their market, they watch the Food Network.
Mr. Raad, whose day job is as assistant professor of art at Cooper Union in Manhattan, wields every contemporary medium at hand -- computer imaging, animation, search engine minutia, photography, film, video and performance -- in an effort to comprehend the disorienting, obliterating effects of extreme physical and psychological violence.
In an effort to comprehend the mechanism of the formation of pores, the following statements about isotropic etching give a better understanding.
Yet the fact is, without making a thorough effort to comprehend the motives, fears and capabilities of Al Qaeda's militants, we can hardly hope to defeat them.
Today it takes a certain effort to comprehend what made his sculptures so popular, but the whole story of his career, as related by the exhibition "John Rogers: American Stories" at the New-York Historical Society, is fascinating.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23. Wright's poems don't bear down toward conclusions, they expand and evanesce as if in a valiant, impossible effort to comprehend and demonstrate Wittgenstein's dictum that "the world is all that is the case".
God, all the people, places, and things I haven't made the least bit of effort to comprehend should just die already.
In the ordinary way I must tune in laboriously to heavy Celtic accents, and when they're written down the effort to comprehend is doubled because I have to translate the spelling into voices that I can hear in my head.
