FYI, my opinion is it’s a mistake to not have people read the quote-citations out loud (and a mistake not to read the stage directions out lout). Whenever I’ve done Petrov Day, not everyone is reading along, so people sometimes have the experience of “well I’m passing around a candle silently now but I don’t know why” or “I don’t really know who said that quote, I hope it wasn’t important.”
I think that either omitting the don’t-read-the-citations-aloud stage direction, or making it easier to follow (with a uniform italic-text-is-silent convention), would be fine, and I don’t have a strong opinion as to which is better. But before Boston made the change I’m now suggesting, what tended to happen was that people inconsistently read or didn’t read the citations aloud, and this was confusing and distracting.
FYI, my opinion is it’s a mistake to not have people read the quote-citations out loud (and a mistake not to read the stage directions out lout). Whenever I’ve done Petrov Day, not everyone is reading along, so people sometimes have the experience of “well I’m passing around a candle silently now but I don’t know why” or “I don’t really know who said that quote, I hope it wasn’t important.”
I think that either omitting the don’t-read-the-citations-aloud stage direction, or making it easier to follow (with a uniform italic-text-is-silent convention), would be fine, and I don’t have a strong opinion as to which is better. But before Boston made the change I’m now suggesting, what tended to happen was that people inconsistently read or didn’t read the citations aloud, and this was confusing and distracting.