Point-of-purchase advertising (POP) is responsible for half of the purchase decisions made in the store. Because of: 1) the influence of POP on the sale of technical consumer products and the economy; 2) our need to understand trends that shape technical and business communication; 3) the intermedial nature of POP (where spoken and written words work with place, visual image, physical structures, and multimedia integrated marketing campaigns); and 4) its theatrical and local nature, we need both a situated and theoretical exploration of POP. Drawing upon three months' participant observation in advertising, I describe a POP composing process in an integrated marketing campaign. Cognitive responses to layout and the interrelation of rhetorical canons are considered for preparing communication for a marketplace that is three-dimensional variegated, noisy, and peripatetic.

Although discussion of composition research methods over the last 10 years has culminated in Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) guidelines, these guidelines do not include procedures for verifying qualitative data. Such procedures would entail having a third party check to some degree that the researcher spent the time claimed at the site and that the subjects did what was described and said what was quoted in the published research. This commentary reviews federal policies on research misconduct and government and professional association responses to data faking, noting the additional danger of incompetent investigations of research misconduct. Arguing that the discipline should take appropriate measures to verify qualitative data, I recommend a two-tiered approach.

What roles does writing play in larger communications also involving physically discrete but related texts of other media? How may the properties of what we normally consider writing be modified in such communications? The intermedial context of much workplace writing has been largely overlooked. This study of an insurance company's communication department describes how (a) three written products served as parts of larger messages in multiple media campaigns, (b) an attempt to combine composing processes for print and video failed, and (c) conflicting generic and stylistic properties of other media caused an intermedial graft to fail. The author's study shows that in the right circumstances, a multiple media “overtext” can override some of the rules that govern what and how one communicates in an individual medium. When a written text is involved, its nature may change as it forms symbiotic relationships with texts of other media.

Two widely disseminated approaches impose reductive boundaries on ethnographic research by privileging one context of meaning over other essential contexts. The first, emphasizing statistical validity, privileges the research community by recommending that the ethnographer's data analysis via coding agree with that of other raters from the research community. The second asserts that the ethnographer who comes closest to validity comes closest to presenting only the subject's point of view. Ethnography, however, comprises four essential, overlapping contexts: the phenomenal context (that which is observed/recorded), the site's cultural context (the subjects' outlook), the research community context, and the researcher's interior context, shaped by experience and education. Each of the four vantages has dominating tendencies, but if one does dominate to the exclusion of others, the reductive result is data-centered, thin description; subjects-centered groupthink; research community-centered groupthink; or researchercentered solipsism. Although all contexts of meaning are important, none should fully eclipse the others.

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