To answer your example question: \usepackage[shortlabels]{enumitem} Then you can simply use: \begin{enumerate}[(a)] \item The first item

To answer your example question: \usepackage[shortlabels]{enumitem} Then you can simply use: \begin{enumerate}[(a)] \item The first item \item The second item \item The third etc \end{enumerate} Other label types are very intuitive this way. I could have pulled this from an old document I made, no memorizing neccesary. It is also very easy to find using a search engine, as I did in this case: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/208696/using-enumerate https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/208696/using-enumera...