The part of the sentence "define the characteristics of" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when you are asking someone to explain the qualities, features, or composition of something. For example, "Please define the characteristics of a successful leader."
The concentration of the salt will define the characteristics of the pickle.
Avoiding a simplistic chronology, the curators have chosen to define the characteristics of British design thematically.
To define the characteristics of placental stillbirth and the possible contribution of thrombophilic risk factors.
An interface, shown above, is used to define the characteristics of intended recipients, and the system takes care of the rest.
Dodd-Frank also required regulators to define the characteristics of loans that would most likely be repaid.
When Susan Sontag set out to define the characteristics of camp in her 1964 essay, she made clear that the excess and parody associated with camp contain a complex series of codes rooted in the gay sensibility.
Molecular descriptors from computational chemistry are considered as independent variables to define the characteristics of an IL molecule.
Thus, we propose solutions to deal with "vertical fit" problems and to define the characteristics of the operational dimension.
Researchers carefully define the characteristics of the participants (e.g., age and gender) and the condition (e.g., disease type, stage, and prior treatment) being studied.
These are strongly dependent upon the directionality of the wavefield and critically important when seeking to define the characteristics of an extreme, near-breaking, wave.
This enables us to derive the rigidity dependence of observations, and helps us to define the characteristics of the modulation function in the heliosphere.
