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-enumera...