The phrase "essentially formal" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe something that is fundamentally formal in nature, often indicating a primary characteristic.
Example: "The dress code for the event is essentially formal, requiring attendees to wear suits or elegant dresses."
Alternatives: "primarily formal" or "fundamentally formal."
Freed by Cesaire's impulse from the glacial constraints of French classicism, the writers of the Caribbean found at their disposal a language that, while essentially formal and cultured in a European sense, could also be used to great effect to mirror or respond to the imaginative life of their own islands.
And this task seems always to result either in claims about the immediate graspability of aesthetic properties, which are arguably insufficient to the task, or in claims about the essentially formal nature of aesthetic properties, which are arguably groundless.
Essentially, formal quality of life assessment in clinical trials is considered not only cumbersome, complex and costly but is also plagued by several unresolved methodological and statistical problems that make it difficult to interpret results.
If settlements are not reached, the commission's staff could choose to issue a notice of reasonable cause against each of the former Spitzer aides, which is essentially a formal complaint that would lay out the commission's case.
A statement of objections, essentially a formal list of charges, is the first step in proceedings that could lead to Gazprom's being forced to change its business practices in Eastern Europe.
- the obligation to respect the constitutional order – essentially a formal provision of declarative nature, found in most European countries, allowing action to be taken, for instance, if armed attacks are promoted against democratic institutions.
The basic logical tool is essentially axiomatic formal analysis.
TLA+ is essentially a formal language for doing just that.
The legal status of citizen is essentially the formal expression of membership in a polity that has definite territorial boundaries within which citizens enjoy equal rights and exercise their political agency.
However, the claim that a conception of impartiality that is not only substantive but also extraordinarily demanding can be derived from a requirement which, as just pointed out, is essentially a formal one, continues to strike a majority of moral philosophers as dubious.
A world geometry is not the physical theory of such a world but a framework or "graphical representation" in whose terms existing physical theory might be displayed, essentially by formal mathematical identification of known tensors of the existing physical laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, with tensors derived within a the world geometry.
