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Several times I've seen lists formatted like this: My parenthetical pet peeves: 1) Referring to a single parenthesis as "a parenthesee" or something similarly beastly. 2) Smiley faces prec...
#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/5680 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
Several times I've seen lists formatted like this: > My parenthetical pet peeves: > 1) Referring to a single parenthesis as "a parenthesee" or something similarly beastly. > 2) Smiley faces preceding closing parentheses. (How do you handle them? :)) > 3) Unmatched parentheses. To me, it would make more sense to enclose the numbers in parentheses: > My parenthetical pet peeves: > (1) Referring to a single parenthesis as "a parenthesee" or something similarly beastly. > (2) Smiley faces preceding closing parentheses. (How do you handle them? :)) > (3) Unmatched parentheses. Or to use periods: > My parenthetical pet peeves: > > 1. Referring to a single parenthesis as "a parenthesee" or something similarly beastly. > 2. Smiley faces preceding closing parentheses. (How do you handle them? :)) > 3. Unmatched parentheses. [I'm not the only one](http://xkcd.com/859/) who is unsettled by unmatched parentheses. Is there authoritative sanction or condemnation of this method of formatting list numerals?