Students' literacy development in middle school has important implications for their academic trajectories, both in high school and beyond. In this paper, we present a systematic response analysis of sixth grade students' attempts to generate the main idea of short sections of text. We describe patterns that emerged from our analysis of main idea statements generated by 286 sixth grade students in the United States. Through this analysis, we demonstrate the need for strategic, targeted instruction that can address different types of responses that middle school students may provide when generating the main idea of a section. We assert that if teachers understand common misunderstandings in students' conceptions of the main idea, teachers can more proactively plan literacy instruction.