Question

What does 3-5 pages look like for a compare and contrast paper?

Answer 1

What do you mean by "look?"

The length? The amount of work? The necessary key points? etc

Answer 2

For length, I took a scan of a previous essay I wrote and one page was about 330 words. So a 3-5 paper should take around 850 - 1600 pages (I accounted slightly for the MLA introductory block, name, class, prof, etc).

Answer 3

That is double spaced btw^

As for comparing and contrasting, you likely want to provide a strong introduction that compares what you're looking at in a thesis "Dogs and cats are both mammals," then how they strongly contrast "yet cats behave more independently than dogs."

Then you can start your first body paragraph describing how they are similar. Then the second body can start on how dogs are more companion/pack based, then the third body paragraph how cats are more solitary hunters, etc.

That's a simple structure of how you might see it appear. Obviously based on your research and topic, you may have more than one paragraph comparing them and maybe more or less paragraphs contrasting them.