I don't think the author's case for philosophy not being driven by confusion over words holds up. His argument is basically that he knows what he means when he uses a word, so how can there be confusion? For example:

'When I ask, "How do I know I’m not in the matrix?," I'm asking, "Why should I believe that I’m not in the matrix?"'

Ok, fine, but is that what everybody who uses the word "know" means by it? And shifting to the word "believe", as the author does here, doesn't help; there's just as much argument over what "believe" means, or should mean, as over what "know" means, or should mean.

In some cases he doesn't even explicitly give his preferred meaning, but just assumes that we all know what it is:

'Whether someone was "free to act" is something that we consider often in legal settings, and I think it’s right for us to ask this question before we lock someone up.'

Which may well be true, but it still leaves open the question of what, exactly, we are asking when we ask if someone was "free to act". What do we need to take into account in order to decide the legal case one way or the other? And is the legal question the same question as all the other questions that are pointed at when we use the term "free will"? The author seems to assume that we all agree on all these things, but the philosophical literature makes clear that we don't.

In fact, as this example illustrates, the author mis-states Graham's point about confusion over words. He says:

'To say that a question can be answered by saying, "Depends on what you mean by X" is far from proving that the question is motivated by a confusion over words.'

But Graham didn't claim that we could answer all philosophical questions by just defining what we mean by X (and he certainly didn't claim that we could answer them just by saying "Depends on what you mean by X"). He only claimed that the questions aren't well-defined unless we specify what we mean by X. What looks like one question could end up being three or four (or seven or eight) depending on which definition we choose for X; so unless and until we pin down the question more precisely, we end up talking past each other instead of actually accomplishing anything. I tend to agree with Graham that much of philosophy suffers from exactly this disease.

Finally, I would like to see some evidence for this claim of the author's:

'Graham seems to be saying that if a philosophy professor can’t distinguish a “real” philosophy paper from a fake, placebo paper that is purposely filled with nonsense, then the real paper is meaningless. If this is Graham’s proposal, I think that many philosophy professors could pass this test for many philosophical texts. There are definitely some charlatans posing as philosophers out there, but that doesn’t mean that all or most of philosophy is B.S.