"former way" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe something that used to be done or experienced in one particular manner. For example, "I used to get to the office in the former way, but now I take a different route."
I wonder sometimes if he even remembers our former way of being.
I grew up eating what my grandmother called "critter fritters," made the former way with crab and seasoned with Worcestershire sauce, garlic and beer.
Those who prefer the former way will reach a state of isolation, the others an infinitely blissful eternal life in, through, and for God, with whom they are one in nature but not identical.
Yet the urge to rediscover a former way of performing is the foundation of the modern creed of authenticity, and those responsible for these recordings have presumed, like any Baroque specialist, that making music is an exercise in archaeology.
My wife and I recently came across a place that seems to encapsulate many of those qualities: a former way station for pilgrims now converted into a minimalist hotel, set in 1,000 hectares of cork oaks.
Despite the community's "emotional ties to BIOT [British Indian Ocean Territory] and their desire to go back to their former way of life", the government would instead seek to support the communities where they now live.
With regulators imposing stricter requirements on big firms, the former ways of Wall Street now look less desirable.
And yet, instead of using a moment of collapse as an opportunity to remake the world, we have just returned, stunned and diminished, to our former ways.
In 21 Grams, for which she received an Oscar nomination, she was a recovering drug addict who returns to her former ways after her husband and children are killed in a road accident.
Not only was the sound excessively loud and boring, it also spoke of former ways of creating expression through tones and rhythms, ways irrelevant to most of the achievements and intimations in the biennial.
High-caste Hindus were more likely to say that they had voted to bring the Maoists to power because they feared they would otherwise return to the local forests and their former ways: extorting money and kidnapping children.The Maoists have indeed promised to end caste-based discrimination, and they probably mean to try.
