In recent years corpus linguistics research findings have begun to trickle down into some student language learning texts, both in terms of the focus and the specific material taught. However, when it comes to writing pedagogy, the materials, templates and the models presented to students tend to show a remarkably conservative (and uniform) approach, showing little, if any, alignment to or acknowledgement of recent research findings. In this paper 10 student argumentative essays, addressing real issues and written outside of a classroom context, are analyzed in detail from a genre and register perspective, with a view to documenting how these writers go about developing their arguments macro- and micro-linguistically. The results of the analyses indicate that some common approaches to argumentative pedagogy align with argument product: however, it is also clear that there are significant departures between typical pedagogical advice and actual written arguments. The paper ends by making a number of pedagogical recommendations.