Objectives The purpose of this study is to suggest a way to overcome the limitations of process-centered writing education by identifying the cognitive action in which the writer reflects on his/her text during the writing process.
 Methods According to pragmatic semiotics, the interpreter of signs constitutes an immediate, dynamic and final interpretive body. In the writing situation, the writer is both a producer and an interpreter of signs, so he must be able to actively construct such interpretations. Each interpretive body can be specified as a text representation, a reader representation, and a discourse community representation. The cognitive strategies constituting each representation can be explained by the suitability theory, which is a model of pragmatic reasoning.
 Results The composition of text representation is related to bottom-up reading, while reader representation and linguistic community representation are related to connotation and contextual meaning, respectively, both of which involve top-down reading. When the author reads the text he is writing for the purpose of text reflection, a conscious effort is required to exclude the meaning and background knowledge he is trying to convey. Therefore, when reflecting on text, it is necessary to distinguish between bottom-up reading and top-down reading, and to divide top-down reading into reader representation and linguistic community representation, and select and perform one reading method at a time.
 Conclusions In the process of text reflection, the representations that can be constructed are related to the subject, purpose, reader, and language community, so it is necessary to teach them in sequence by rhetorical element. Just as the layers of reading are divided into factual, inferential, and critical understanding, it is possible to sequence the layers of my text reflection into three representations. Cognitive actions that form an inference model centered on each rhetorical element can be strategically made into educational content.