"attempts to grasp" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when you are referring to someone making an effort to understand or comprehend something. For example, "The student attempted to grasp the professor's lecture on Ancient Greek philosophy."
Ultimately the interpretations were only words: futile attempts to grasp something beyond language and maybe beyond mind.
It wriggled free despite the officers' repeated attempts to grasp it before they retired for the night tonight.
The LA hipsters who flocked around him in the mid-60s sneered behind his back at his terrible taste, his galumphing attempts to grasp the counter-culture.
Senior environment ministry officials in Japan have indicated that the country may have to revisit its own goals for cutting greenhouse gases as it attempts to grasp the impact of the crisis and the realities of post-quake reconstruction.
Not that the St Johnstone were happy with just five goals, though, and Dan Ward denied MacLean a hat-trick with a low save, although the on-loan Liverpool man took two attempts to grasp the ball safely.
That comment, almost touching in its optimism that Trump might possess the will to graduate from his novice status, reminded me of an episode of "The Office" in which Michael Scott, the zippy fool-in-chief of the Dunder Mifflin paper company, attempts to grasp a basic accounting concept the surplus upon which an executive decision must turn.
The necessary details have been planted scrupulously to thwart every attempt to grasp a glib 'explanation'explanation
(To see him attempting to grasp the Duckworth-Lewis method, visit this URL: bit.ly/gowerisagenius – I'm not joking).
Paul Howlett Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993), 9pm, Film4 Hollywood's restrained and honourable attempt to grasp the Aids nettle.
It seemed that, in certain areas, there was not a fierce enough attempt to grasp the spirit of the charter.
