A reader of The Sun has complained about what he calls a misspelling. He is offended that we do not capitalize president in all references to the president of the United States. We write President Bush but the president, and the reader finds this disrespectful and incorrect.

Some other readers have questioned why The Sun does not capitalize evangelical in articles about evangelical Christians.

These usages are not errors or marks of disrespect, but examples of house style. Publications establish house style for consistency wherever usage presents a choice: capitalized or lowercase, word or numeral for a number, abbreviated word or spelled-out word. The Sun, like most American newspapers, follows the style set by the Associated Press, with a number of local variations and exceptions. In AP style, president is lowercased unless it precedes the name of the person holding the title, and evangelical is lowercased unless it is part of the formal title of a denomination or other organization.

The point of a house style is not that the excluded choices are wrong, but simply that whenever there are two (or more) acceptable ways of writing a thing, house style chooses one to minimize distraction to the reader.

Most newspapers used to capitalize president in all references to the U.S. chief executive (Should we capitalize chief executive?), but AP style reflects the prevailing tendency in American English over the past century to reduce the amount of capitalization.

The word evangelical is a more difficult issue, because many evangelical Christians capitalize the term, and that usage can be found in many dictionaries — though dictionaries are records of what people say and write, not guides to what they ought to say and write. But evangelical cannot be identified with particular denominations, such as the Orthodox churches; it is a viewpoint, like conservative. Neither is it an adjective former from a proper noun, like Pentecostal.

We could capitalize it — we could also capitalize fundamentalist or charismatic or, for that matter, mainline. But rather than multiply capitalizations, we elect to follow the AP in this case.