This study aims to investigate the use of the high-frequency verb make in the argumentative essays of American native speakers and Korean EFL learners through a corpus-based analysis. The investigation focuses on how frequently American NS students and Korean EFL learners use the verb make, how the categories of meaning differ between the two groups, and what kinds of errors are dominantly made by Korean EFL learners. The study adopts a frequency-driven quantitative approach in order to identify frequently used semantic categories of make. The quantitative approach is supported by further qualitative analysis of the instances of make as presented in each corpus, in which the differences are delineated with reference to the various categories of meaning of the verb. The findings show that Korean EFL learners overuse make compared with their native speaker counterparts in terms of the overall frequency. With regards to the sematic categories, the productive and causative uses were overused by the Korean EFL learners whereas the delexical use was underused by them. An error analysis revealed some dominant patterns of misuse of the verb by the Korean EFL learners.