The phrase "devote much effort" is grammatically correct and commonly used in written English.
It means to put in a lot of effort or dedicate a significant amount of time and energy to something. Example: In order to achieve success, you must devote much effort to your studies and constantly strive to improve your skills.
The EU fails to devote much effort to tackling this corrosive problem.
Even in wealthy countries, companies are not likely to devote much effort to minor crops.
In a film that doesn't devote much effort to inventing original characters and situations, careers and relationships take shape -- or don't -- strictly according to expectations.
Our unwillingness to devote much effort to understanding how others might actually think or feel is exemplified by the popular assumption that Knox's initial admission to police that she had been present at the scene of the murder, and her false implication of the bartender, Diya "Patrick Lumumbaa, revealed a guilty conscience.
In private lending or P2P lending, lenders need to devote much effort to the investigation of borrowers' credit.
Although major databases would never claim perfection they devote much effort towards maintaining stability, chemistry rules, search reproducibility, updating and source provenance (at least in the secondary sense where primary provenance and quality ultimately resides with the submitters).
Isaac Asimov, for example, devoted much effort to creating an ethical system for humans and robots.
He also devoted much effort to the 30-second rebuttal the candidates could ask for.
With so little business to handle, nobody is devoting much effort to making small international payments move faster.
In his later years he devoted much effort to the preservation of the purity of the Hungarian language.
Liberals saw him as caustic and arrogant, and devoted much effort to attempting to catch him out in self-contradiction.
