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
repetition

Answer 1

parallelism

The series of noun phrases ("rectangular pink erasers, crayons, yellow pencils, wrinkled work sheets..., a lime Dum Dum lollipop") uses a parallel list structure—items presented in the same grammatical form.