The phrase "attempt to define how" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when discussing efforts to clarify or explain a process or concept.
Example: "In this paper, we will attempt to define how social media influences public opinion."
Alternatives: "try to explain how" or "seek to clarify how".
The district was created in 1985 in an attempt to define how the waterfront would be used.
The goal of this review is to compare these two drug delivery approaches from a physico-chemical and a biopharmaceutical standpoint in an attempt to define how nanotechnology-based products can be differentiated from standard oral dosage forms for oral bioavailability of diabetes peptides.
The FTC plans to address this issue in 2012 through a public workshop where it attempt to define how "mobile privacy disclosures" should work, including how they can be "short, effective, and accessible to consumers on small screens".
In addition, we make no attempt to define how changes in a P450's enzymatic functions might map to changes in the overall fitness of its host organism, since there is not sufficient data on the metabolic and ecological role of P450 BM3 to convincingly reconstruct such a mapping.
The theme of most New York City inaugurations is the unwilling transfer of power, as the new mayor generally attempts to define how he will do the job differently than the people who came before.
The local coefficient (L) attempts to define how "local" each category of product or service must be, normalized on a scale of 0 to 1.
There are have been three versions of the epistemological approach, each of which attempts to define how an cognitively ideal agent arrives at warranted conclusions, given an initial input.
There are some initial attempts to define how containers should be secured, but for most part, security operations teams feel they are left in the dark regarding what they might be doing wrong, or are they indeed enforcing industry best practices in their containerized applications.
Despite the imprecision inherent in the term, there have been attempts to define how the word "alcoholism" should be interpreted when encountered.
Therefore, we next attempted to define how USP2 could affect the function of clock components.
