I bought the Arduino starter kit which came with a UNO, breadboard (small) and some components. I've been trying to work through some of the early projects. I took a side track and tried to create project to dim an LED with the included potentiometer. It is the kind with two pins on the back and one in the front. This may seem off the wall but I cannot figure out how to place it on the breadboard. The only way it seems to fit (without trying to force it into the breadboard) is with the two back pins on the same row of the breadboard. That does not make sense. it seems that those two pins should be on a column. However, the pins do not fit all the way down into the breadboard. Any suggestions appreciated. By the way, all the stuff I found on the Internet seem to use potentiometers with all three pins on one side. Thanks.
Typical breadboards have letters across the top, indicating columns, and numbers down the side, indicating rows. A row is all tied together on its side of the board. Nothing in a column is tied together, except if there is a side column for power rails.
So, you want the pins to all be on different rows. You're allowed to bend pins if that helps. Post a picture or a link if you can.
I should add how a potentiometer works. The two outer pins are a fixed resistance. You can measure this with a multimeter, if you have one, or it may be labeled on it or in the parts kit. The middle pin is connected to a movable wiper that varies the resistance between that middle pin and each of the outer pins. The sum of those two resistances will always equal the total "outer" resistance.
Thanks. I knew that that two back pins had to be on different row. I was just that the potentiometer did not fit well. I bent the pins and made it fit and know the sketch works. Thanks for the help. Last week I could even spell potentiometer do I've been doing a lot of reading.
A lot of "through hole" components are made for printed circuit boards, where the board is designed with a specific part in mind. There are some switches I use with breadboards that don't fit well, so I've soldered them to wires or header pins to make them more breadboard-friendly.
Potentiometers are simply not made to fit into a breadboard. Do not even try! 
There are two styles of terminals. The older style is intended to have wires ("flying leads") soldered into the loops.
The more recent style is designed to mount into a PCB - in holes that are larger than most wires:
You need to solder wires to the tags - of either variety - sufficiently long and of equal projection to fit in to your breadboard. Plain uninsulated Tinned Copper Wire is what you want; if you assemble through-hole resistors or capacitors into PCBs you usually end up with a quantity of the off-cuts clipped from them after soldering which you keep for purposes such as this.