Are personal and academic writing similar?

In some ways they are similar. Both personal and academic writing is aimed at an audience. The academic writer for his fellow academics and the personal writer to whomever they are address their writing to. Both are trying to get messages across, sometimes thoughts, ideas, feelings all of which can be very hard to be expressed in Words and make you're understood. I could say that academic writers are trying to get complex/complicated ideas across but so do those engaged in personal writing. A personal writer could be writing about love, fear, anger which is as complex/complicated as any lofty academic treatise. Superficially both the personal writer and academic writer might thing the writing is as different as different can be but examined more carefully based on the purpose and the complexity of the ideas in both there are more similarities than differences.