A corpus-based analysis of the use of linking adverbials (LAs) in model essays for students of English and authentic essays composed by professional writers was conducted with a self-established model essay corpus (MEC) and the New York Times Annotated Corpus (NYTAC). Data from the two corpora were retrieved and analyzed by means of Antconc 3.2.4. It was found that the percentages of the top ten most frequently used LAs accounted for 46% and 52% of the total number of LAs used in MEC and NYTAC, respectively. The model essays contained far more instances of additive, adversative, causal/resultative, and sequential LAs, but significantly fewer types of LA than did NYTAC. Further, LAs in MEC were predominantly placed at sentence initial position whereas those in NYTAC were employed at varying positions in a sentence.