Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on integrating corpora in a graduate-level technical editing course to teach students about writing variation. Students applied this knowledge to edit research-based texts for non-native English speakers within the STEM disciplines. Though this case history focuses on corpora in a technical editing course, the approaches I describe transfer to any course with a writing component as well as across grade levels and student proficiencies. I conclude by addressing the barriers associated with integrating corpus-based learning into the classroom.