\Alph counter doesn't change its value in \paragraph

Question

I'm using \paragraph as a way to have some \subsubsubsection. They should appear as:

A) something
B) some other thing

Instead, each time I use \paragraph I only get an A). Can someone help me understand what I'm doing wrong, please?

Here is my code:

\newcounter{somecounter}
\setcounter{somecounter}{1}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\paragraph{\@startsection{paragraph}{4}{\z@}%
  {-3.25ex\@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}%
  {1.5ex \@plus .2ex}%
  {\normalfont\normalsize\itshape\Alph{somecounter})}}
\makeatother

Answer 1

Why are you using somecounter here? Your code does exactly what you ask it to, printing the value of somecounter as a letter. Presumably, you wanted to instead write \theparagraph where you currently have \Alph{somecounter} and redefine \theparagraph using

\RenewExpandableDocumentCommand{\theparagraph}{}{\Alph{paragraph}}

You’ll likely also need to change the value of secnumdepth

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{4}

since by default, section numbering stops at \subsubsection.

Note that the \@startsection command does a number of things behind the scenes for you, including calling \refstepcounter{paragraph} which not only advances the counter value, but also sets the appropriate values behind the scenes so that \label and \ref will work as intended.