The plentiful and steadily increasing literature on teaching and learning in higher education has produced a number of helpful frameworks and guidelines that can be applied to the development and communication of assessment practice. The continued prevalence of much imprecise, unclear and otherwise confusing terminology around the discussion of assessment tasks, however, indicates the lack of a framework that facilitates understanding of individual task components. This paper describes an approach to addressing this gap in the literature through the development of an assessment task design framework drawn from systemic functional linguistics. To date, application of the framework has included the support of academics in "designing out" opportunities for plagiarism and the succinct description of assessment innovations. The paper concludes that the framework has the potential not only to underpin more purposeful design and analysis of assessment tasks but also to introduce academics to a vast but generally unfamiliar literature on the systematic development of academic communication skills and to encourage the critique of assessment as cultural practice. (Contains 2 figures.)