The phrase 'took great effort' is correct and can be used in written English.
You could use this phrase to emphasize the amount of effort that was put into a task, making it clear that it was difficult. Example sentence: "The project took great effort, but we managed to finish it on time."
It took great effort to remember her name.
But getting back the property took great effort even once the government issued a repossession certificate.
It took great effort on his part, meeting people with horrific stories to tell, people who have a right to have their testimony heard.
He told The Times: "The school took great effort to submit their bid to give greater detailed information on how it will be one school, not two schools, and they did a very good job on that.
It took great effort, he said, to rid the hotel of its drug dealer residents, and he continually defends the place against their return, denying a room to anybody he finds suspect.
Immigrants' families say it took great effort to scrape together the thousands of dollars needed to send relatives to the United States, a sum that includes the fees charged by the people who help them sneak in.
Most of these "turkeys" share a grand scale — they're mighty works that took great efforts and great funds to realize, and that were victimized by advance reports about their directors' out-of-control spending and willful behavior.
A more disturbing thought is that while many news outlets took great efforts to chronicle the plight of the white working classes in middle America, their dispatches didn't register with millions of voters for the simple reason that those voters weren't reading any of us.
Proponents of the diagnosis pointed to greater awareness of child abuse as the key factor that made widespread diagnosis possible, since it took great efforts to overcome public reticence on that key causal factor.
Users seemed fairly forgiving, however, with supportive tweets and messages to the company – likely not only because of Basecamp's beloved status in the tech community, but also because the company took great efforts at keeping its users updated via a number of channels, including status.basecamp.com, Twitter, and an off-site Gist powered by GitHub.
In any number of ways -- the first of which is his perfectly ludicrous removal of the play from the setting in which Williams took great efforts to place it.
