I need a little help to get me going on how to start this program.

I know how to create a string array, but I'm having trouble getting the overall structure for this program. Any help or links to helpful sites would be appreciated.

Write a program that will read a paragraph into an array. Each word should then be stored in a pointer array. Punctuation characters should be ignored. Using the pointer array, print the words out in the original order, reverse order and backwards. Without using any C++ library string functions, print the number of letters in each word. Also keep track of the number of words read, the length of the longest word, the length of the shortest word and number of times each word length occurred.
The screen should pause after each section of output. Label your output. The maximum length of the paragraph should be 256 characters (or the size of your input buffer).The pointer array should be large enough to handle 20 words.

Everything for using C-style strings is in string.h
Here's a reference:
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstring/

It looks like you are supposed to read the entire text into one array, max size 256. Then, pull each word out, storing to a dynamically allocated array of strings (char ** ). You will have to find the length of each word, or at least the length of the longest word, in order to allocate the string arrays, before storing the individual words. Be sure to place null terminators at the end of each word as you store them.

From that point, it's just the easy stuff that's left.