an authoritative and comprehensive guide to punctuation and everything you need for the accepted standards in British English, equivalent to CMS.
Don't forget, Nepharlan, that a
style guide is just that: a guide to the
preferred style of a particular institution. It isn't necessarily authoritative, nor necessarily an accepted standard, outside that institution. The CMS (or CMOS, as the Chicago Manual of Style styles itself
👁 Wink ;)) started life as a style guide for publications of the University of Chicago Press. It just happens that it has been adopted by numerous other publishers and individuals, and has become a widely used reference in the USA, but it can't (at least shouldn't) be used to invalidate other writing and typographical styles.
In my experience, no single style guide has been adopted in the UK as widely as the CMOS has been in the US. In fact I'd say that very few BrE speakers (outside of particular institutions) use style guides as a general reference.
Among the guides mentioned by JulianStuart in #2, The Economist's style guide is a guide aimed at their own writers, as the guide's
introduction makes clear; and the punctuation guide of the
University of Sussex appears on the 'Sussex Internal' part of their website.
That said, all of these sources can be very useful to other learners, as long as you remember that they don't (and don't claim to) represent a universally 'correct' style. Personally, I find the Sussex guide very interesting, as it also presents alternative variants and exceptional cases, and gives practical examples of how some (mis)uses can cause ambiguity or misunderstanding, and then argues in favour of a certain usage on the basis of common sense (rather than just saying 'Do this because it's a rule!').
Ws
