Even though the existence and importance of inner forms of sign-making are acknowledged in social-semiotic educational research, their contours have, none the less, yet to be charted in a systematic way. This article uses a combination of social-semiotic and pragmatist approaches to bring into focus some characteristics of pupils' inner sign-making taking place during a research project which focused on literary and non-literary classroom reading events involving 13- and 14-year-old students. It makes reference to a number of descriptions by students of their inner sign-making in response to texts. These descriptions took the form of annotations and sketches, verbal commentaries and interview responses on two literary and two non-literary texts, and they suggested that students' inner activity in response to all four texts appeared to operate in multimodal and genre-dependent ways. This paper concludes by calling for further research into the role of pupils' inner sign-making in classroom events and how it varies between different subjects, individuals or socio-cultural groups.