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The paper considers how ethnomethodology can help in sociological understanding of the practices of creating and reading different kinds of texts in everyday, routine settings. First, it makes visible the ordinary, taken-for-granted texts in everyday life and illustrates how these texts are features of local, situated contexts and courses of action. The text, then, ceases to be treated by analysts (following lay members) as either (a) a transparent, unproblematic conduit to the world of objectively-given objects beyond that text or (b) as coterminous with that world of objectively-given objects, as simply “adhering” to those objects. Secondly, it treats the text as an evolved production, a production with its own “natural history” of production practices and which possesses what can be called its own “active” properties. Thirdly, the paper highlights the “activation” or “animation” of the text through the practices of reading in particular local settings. Each aspect of the activated text thus tends routinely to be buried within the taken-for-granted and must be exhumed. The term “(the) text-as-read” was devised in order to provisionally raise each aspect of texts into visibility, to render it available for analytic inspection. All these three achievements of the paper demonstrate the specific ethnomethodological approach to ordinary professional and lay textual practices and allow sociologists to examine how members of the society use locally the culturally available recourses and knowledge to make sense of the situationally produced and used texts.