This paper examines how writing samples produced by middle school students reveal their emerging academic identities through their rhetorical choices in writing. Analyses of two texts produced by each student revealed students’ implicit understandings of the requirements of academic voice. Through comparisons of each student’s texts, strategies for taking up academic voices become more transparent. We provide analytic tools with which to reframe how student essays that may not conform to expected conventions of academic writing might be read by teachers, and we suggest that instructional intervention to fill gaps in students’ written expression can facilitate students emergent academic identities.