Question

Read the excerpt from "Surrendering” by Ocean Vuong.

Then he tipped my desk toward me. The desk had a cubby attached to its underside, and I watched as the contents spilled from the cubby’s mouth: rectangular pink erasers, crayons, yellow pencils, wrinkled work sheets where dotted letters were filled in, a lime Dum Dum lollipop. But no poem.

Which element of syntax is used in the excerpt?

parallelism
anaphora
punctuation

Answer 1

Parallelism — the excerpt lists a series of similarly formed items ("rectangular pink erasers, crayons, yellow pencils, wrinkled work sheets..."), creating a parallel series of noun phrases.