Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mack the knife]

Normally I would just blow through a sentence like this, but for some reason, today I had to stop and think (dammit):

If you do these exercises, they will help your mind and body.
("they" obviously reflecting "exercises").

Sounds good, but then I thought about this:

If you do these exercises, it will help your mind and body.
("it" being reflexive of the process of "doing" the exercises).

Which is correct?

[pastis]

You already answered the question in your parentheses: either is grammatically correct. Likely if I had to choose (on a strict semantic level), I'd go with the second one, because it's a tad more logical. But either way is fine, don't sweat it.

[Woland]

Yeah, both are okay.

What's interesting is that for the 'it' sentence, the grammatical reference for 'it' is only implied; 'do these exercises' is a verb phrase. But we can derive the nominalization from it and thus, pragmatically, the sentence makes sense.

[Skaborough]

Seeing as both are technically correct, I would lean to the first. As neither is incorrecct I would use the one that sounds/flows better. Form is as important as function.

Payce