The phrase "a useful yardstick" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a standard or measure that helps evaluate or compare something effectively.
Example: "The success of the pilot program serves as a useful yardstick for future initiatives."
Alternatives: "a helpful benchmark" or "a practical measure".
The ONS accepts that no one is "average", and that the CPI inflation figure may not strictly apply to any one individual or family, but "still gives us a useful yardstick of the impact of inflation on our own pocket or purse".
That's a useful yardstick".
The radius in which the ambulance can work serves as a useful yardstick for the security situation in the region.
Certainly, well-made tests can be a useful yardstick, providing information that enables teachers to diagnose students' weaknesses.
But if a blacks v whites match provides a useful yardstick of societal progress, we should examine it carefully.
And they are worth listening to, if only because they may offer a useful yardstick for gauging the gravity and scope of the eight proposed plans.
But for the same reason, a more useful yardstick is the four-week average of initial claims, and that posted its fourteenth straight drop this week, reaching its lowest number since October 2008.
What the reports seem to suggest, taken together, is that there is no useful yardstick, and no clear indicator of whether the arrow points down or up.
Discounting the Pirates of the Caribbean films – more in the summer-blockbuster idiom than this vellum-bound piece of matinee escapism – the most useful yardstick is Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, from back in 2003.
But Robert McGrath at leading commercial real estate agency CBRE said that the most useful yardstick is the rent for prime retail spaces on the ritziest streets in each city.
He told a Tory conference fringe meeting that migration targets could be useful "yardsticks" for holding the government to account but he had concerns about how it was being explained.
