The phrase 'painstaking exercise' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe a task that requires a great amount of time, effort, and attention to detail. For example, "It took me days to finish the painstaking exercise of organizing all my old photos into albums."
That's more or less the case in the new "Arrested Development," but the paradoxical result is that Season 4 is a painstaking exercise in the art of withholding.
Watching Mr. Zukerman boil and eat one egg, then do the whole painstaking exercise a second time, is straining the patience of the viewers, who have already accepted the play's conceit.
The review entailed not only the painstaking exercise of mapping the movements of all concerned, over many hours, but also the extensive exercise of seeking to resolve the complex and difficult areas of disagreement between the medical experts.
This might sound like a painstaking exercise, but clubs already employ performance data experts to do this for technical analysis so it would just be a case of grouping the information in a different manner.
Creating and maintaining a blended whisky is a painstaking exercise, one that is significantly more difficult than producing a single malt, for the simple reason that so many more elements are involved.
Architectural rendering (an advanced "coloring within the lines," if you will), on the other hand, is a painstaking exercise that that takes decades of experience to master.
Some say it is a caricature of the painstaking exercises to which Satie was subjected at the Conservatoire de Paris.
Now, the police are enduring the painstaking and humiliating exercise of notifying nearly 4,000 angry people listed in the documents that they may have been targets of what now appears to be industrial-strength hacking by The News of the World.
Guard officials have exercised painstaking care not to blame any particular group of rescuers, saying the thieves could have come from any number of agencies working under the rubble.
After a Turquoise Wrap on the evening of my arrival, and the desert hike the next morning, I spent most of the afternoon in the fitness area where my trainer-for-an-hour ($95), Roseann, led me on a painstaking circuit of the exercise machines, with stretches following each workout.
At the Open, the actors attempt to strike a balance between a quirky night schedule and rigid health routines, while their coaches worry about the painstaking details of those exercise and nutrition regimens.
