"mechanical exercise" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use this phrase to describe a physical or mental exercise or activity that requires little thought or effort, such as typing on a keyboard or doing basic arithmetic equations. For example, "The students were given a mechanical exercise to complete in order to practice their typing skills."
Wire-service reporting was by nature a mechanical exercise, however, and Richard yearned to write longer, more narrative pieces.
But it does mean that constitutional law is not a mechanical exercise of just "applying the law".
The standard algorithms should be avoided because, reformists claim, mastering them is a merely mechanical exercise that threatens individual growth.
But for him thinking inside the box is at best a mechanical exercise based on mimicry; at worst it's an impossibility.
Patry Hoskins had only "assisted in the largely mechanical exercise of collecting and organising the evidence which appeared to support the criticisms" in those letters, he said.
From the outset of his career, Maugham was aware of his limitations as a writer; he lacked imagination, he said; writing was something of a mechanical exercise.
A lady lying on a Relax-a-tron mechanical exercising couch, remarked: "One more jostle & I'll become a starlet in Hollywood again".
In the 19th century players went in for elaborate pictorial layouts with descriptive titles such as zodiac, flower garden, British constitution, and the like many of them purely mechanical exercises requiring little thought.
I'd completely forgotten, for example, that the long sequence where Bertie and Logue run through mechanical exercises together ends on an impressively trite note, with Bertie repeating the word "father" over and over again, 10 minutes after a scene in which his dad shouts at him for being a useless stuttering nincompoop.
Misuse of English conjunction related to incoherent writing, according to the literature, comes from learners' first language interference, improper mechanical exercises, and misleading lists of connectors in textbooks demonstrated as if mutually interchangeable without contextual constraints.
His research, including a chance encounter with an uncle whom Logue had treated, indicated he used mechanical breathing exercises combined with psychological counselling to probe the underlying causes of the condition.
