Grammatical Question on a comma....?

Question

I am not sure about the use of a comma in this sentence, and cannot find what I'm looking for online. In this sentence..."Our audience should judge themselves not by asking, “Am I better than an another person,” but rather “Am I better than I used to be?
Should the comma after "person" in the first set of quotes - since it is a break in the sentence rather than the quote itself, be after the quotation mark, or before - as it is here??

Rather confusing question, but I don't know how else to say it. I hope it's clear enough...

Thank you for your help!! Very appreciated...

Answer 1

Put the comma outside with a question mark inside, for parallelism.
"Our audience should judge themselves not by asking “Am I better than an another person?”, but rather “Am I better than I used to be?".

Regardless, the comma goes on the outside, because it separates elements of the sentence, as opposed to delimiting parts of a conversation.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_quote.html

Answer 2

Technically, I think you are suppsed to change the comma to a question mark and add a comma after rather. Also be sure to add quotation marks after the second question mark. The "not by asking" part is confusing too. And don't write "an another".

To make it more clear, I'd write it like this:

Our audience should not ask themselves, "Am I better than another person?" but rather, "Am I better than I used to be?"

Also, if I were writing it in Word or something with formatting options, I would remove the quotation marks and put the two questions in italics.

Answer 3

I think you do not need to use the comma anymore...so your sentence should be like this:

Our audience should judge themselves not by asking "Am I better than the other person?" but rather "Am I better than I used to be?".

Also, I think question marks should be added.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

Hanksimon's answer looks best to me. But I was always taught to use a comma before a quote as well, and it seems to me that most writers do.

Answer 5

Our audience shouldn't judge themselves by asking if they are better than some one else but, rather are they better than they used to be.

Answer 6

THE QUOTATION MARK BEFORE ---OUR-- IS BOTH UNNECESSARY AND NEVER CLOSED ELSEWHERE. AS TO THE COMMAS NONE ARE REQUIRED.