Doctoral dissertation has an important role to embark on an academic career confidently. The case is much more challenging for the early career doctorate who strives to contribute to the wider academic community. Using Swale's IMRD model, this study analyzed the rhetorical organization of English abstracts of 147 doctoral dissertations written between 2010 and 2015 in national graduate programs on English Language Teaching in Turkey. The results revealed 38 DAs with IMRD model and at least 22 rhetorically deficient DAs, lacking critical moves and linguistic realizations. Most DAs seem to exclude the conceptual framework, gap and important submoves. Omission of the Discussion move was also found to be a problem among the DAs. In addition, DAs from the half of the programs do not comply with the word limits offered by the official guidelines. Based on the results, a guideline was prepared to offer a remedy for the responsible bodies.